Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida blamed the police on Friday for the murder just a week ago of former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, when he was participating in an electoral act in the city of Nara. According to the president, the inadequate protection of the escort that accompanied the politician was responsible for the assassination. Kishida made the claims after the National Police Agency announced that he had appointed a “verification and review team” to investigate security lapses related to the attack that killed the influential 67-year-old politician. Meanwhile, new details emerge about the motivation of the murderer, Tetsuya Yamagami, who would have killed Abe for his support of a sect that ruined his mother. According to what an uncle of Yamagami declared this Friday, his mother donated more than 700,000 euros to this church.
At the time of his assassination, Abe was holding a rally in front of Yamato-Saidaiji station for the by-elections to the upper house of the Japanese Parliament, to be held two days later and in which Abe’s party swept. The former prime minister, who was accompanied by four escorts, was in a long space, in the middle of the sidewalk, with metal barriers at knee height. However, the street behind him had not been closed to traffic. The person in charge of covering her declared, after the assassination, that he had been distracted by the passing bicycles. In fact, just after the suspect, Tetsuya Yamagami, approached and shot Abe twice, an individual on a bicycle passed right by him, before the shooter had yet been intercepted and brought down by escorts.
The fact that the noise and smoke from the first detonation were more like an explosion of fireworks than a shot could also have confused the escorts, weapons expert Soichiro Takakura told the Japanese morning newspaper. Asahi. According to this specialist, the murderer could have used black powder of conventional pyrotechnics to approach his victim and shoot at close range without having to raise the weapon to his face.
Yamagami’s home-made weapon is constructed from a conventional shotgun. But, according to Takakura, despite being a rudimentary device with two barrels joined with insulating tape, the design of the buttstock had “considerable calculation work”, since it had the ideal curvature to facilitate the second and last shot.
The motive for the murder
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According to reports in the local press, Tetsuya Yamagami told the police that he acted out of resentment towards the Unification Church, which Shinzo Abe supported and which the assassin blames for the ruin of his family due to donations that his mother made. Yamagami’s mother would have donated at least a hundred million yen (700,000 euros) to the sect founded in 1954 by Sun Myung Moon, self-proclaimed messiah born in what is now North Korea in 1920 and died in 2012 at the age of 92.
Several former parishioners, including a journalist who belonged to the Christian-inspired group, described in a lengthy television program on the NTV channel the coercive methods with which the cult ties, spiritually and financially, its wealthy members in Japan. The obligation to sell objects of little value and to constantly carry out unpaid work are other obligations that sometimes involve entire families. The Tokyo headquarters of the religious group confirmed in a news conference that Yamagami’s mother regularly participated in the congregations, but she declined to comment on the donations, considering them part of the investigation into the assassination.
The sect became known from the beginning for its belligerent anti-communism and its entry into Japan was possible thanks to Nobusuke Kishi, Abe’s grandfather, who administered the Japanese colony of Manchukuo in China and was Minister of Commerce during World War II. When Japan was defeated, Kishi was imprisoned as a war criminal, but was exonerated and became one of the politicians chosen by the allied occupation forces to rebuild the country.
One of his tasks was to counteract the growing communism, so he saw in the nascent Korean cult an ideal ally to carry out his task and invited it to settle in Japan. As the founder of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), Kishi established links between its formation and the Unification Church. Therefore, members of the sect began to volunteer for influential Japanese politicians.
In the fall, a state funeral will be held for Shinzo Abe, who last Monday had already posthumously received the Collar of the Supreme Order of the Chrysanthemum, Japan’s highest decoration, and was buried in a private funeral on Tuesday.
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