The man arrested by Japanese police this Friday on suspicion of the attempted murder of former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is a former member of Japan’s Self-Defense Forces, the equivalent of a country’s armed forces. Tetsuya Yamagami, a 41-year-old unemployed man from the city of Nara, west of the capital Tokyo, was arrested with a gun he would have used to shoot the former Japanese president twice.
The agents also searched his home. According to public broadcaster NHK, the attacker shot Abe in the back. His weapon was homemade. Japanese Defense Ministry sources say the suspected attacker worked for three years until 2005 in the Self-Defense Forces’ naval branch, which was responsible for defending the archipelago.
The motives for the attack have not yet been clarified. Yamagami is said to have stressed in his statements to the police that he was “dissatisfied” with the former president and therefore “went to kill him,” according to police sources quoted by the local press.
Former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, 67, has died after being shot several times in the middle of the street while attending a campaign rally in Nara. The former Japanese leader, who ruled between 2012 and September 2020 before resigning due to ill health, delivered a speech at a rally outside a train station in the former Japanese capital as part of the campaign for the upcoming upper house elections on Sunday. Shortly after he began to speak, at around 11:30 a.m. local time (4:30 a.m. Peninsular Time), he was shot by at least two gunshots and immediately taken to Kashihara Hospital in cardiac arrest.
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