Tetsuya Yamagami, 45, who shot dead Japan’s longest-serving prime minister Shinzo Abe with a homemade gun at a campaign rally in 2022, was sentenced to life imprisonment on Wednesday.
The Nara District Court convicted Yamagami of murder after he admitted to carrying out the assassination during Abe’s public election speech in the western city of Nara on July 8, 2022. Abe was shot in broad daylight while addressing voters outside a train station and Yamagami was apprehended at the scene.
Yamagami used a handmade firearm he had assembled at home to kill the former prime minister, a crime that sent shockwaves across Japan, a country known for having some of the world’s strictest gun control laws and extremely low rates of gun violence.
During the trial, Yamagami’s lawyers sought a prison term of no more than 20 years, arguing that he was a victim of “religious abuse.”The court heard that Yamagami harboured resentment toward the Unification Church after his mother, a member of the sect, donated his late father’s life insurance payout and other family assets, totalling about 100 million yen (approximately S$828,750), to the church, leaving the family financially ruined, as reported by local media.
The killing also drew renewed scrutiny to alleged links between Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and the Unification Church. Yamagami had claimed he targeted Abe because he believed the former leader was connected to the South Korea-originated religious group, formally known as the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification, which rose to prominence in the late 1950s and became a global organisation by the 1980s.
Who Was Shinzo Abe?
Shinzo Abe, who died at the age of 67, was Japan’s longest-serving prime minister and is widely regarded as having presided over the country’s last prolonged period of political stability. Born into a prominent political family, Abe began his political career as a secretary to his father, former Foreign Minister Shintaro Abe, before being elected to the House of Representatives in 1993.
He first served as prime minister from 2006 to 2007 and returned to office in 2012, remaining in power until 2020, when he stepped down due to health reasons after nearly eight years in office.
