Shinzo Abe's Killer Wielded 'Homemade Gun', Had Considered A Bomb Attack, Say Police

Tetsuya Yamagami, the 41-year-old unemployed man arrested for murder of former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, spent months planning the attack with a "homemade gun", said the police on Saturday. It said Yamagami believed Abe was linked to a religious group that was responsible for his mother's financial ruin.

"My mother got wrapped up in a religious group and I resented it," he told police officials, as reported by Kyodo news agency. He said his mother went bankrupt from the donation.

Yamagami further told officials that he considered a bomb attack, but opted for a gun, which he made "by wrapping steel pipes together with tape, some of them with three, five or six pipes, with parts he bought online".

'YAMAGAMI WAS A LONER'

Yamagami, who attacked Abe - Japan's longest-serving Prime Minister - from behind, was loner who did not reply when spoken to, neighbours told Reuters. They said Yamagami was last seen by them three days before Abe's assassination.

Yamagami lived on the eighth floor of a building of small flats.

"I said hello but he ignored me. He was just looking down at the ground to the side not wearing a mask. He seemed nervous," a 69-year-old woman who lived a floor below him told Reuters. "It was like I was invisible. He seemed like something was bothering him."

Another neighbour, a Vietnamese woman living two doors down from Yamagami, also agrees with that and said that 41-year-old appeared to keep to himself. "I saw him a couple of times. I bowed to him in the elevator, but he didn't say anything," the woman, who gave her name as Mai, told Reuters.

NAVY GUN EXPERIENCE

A person named Tetsuya Yamagami served in the Maritime Self-Defence Force from 2002 to 2005, a spokesman for Japan's navy said, declining to say whether this was the suspected killer, as media have reported.

This Yamagami joined a training unit in Sasebo, a major navy base in the southwest, and was assigned to a destroyer artillery section, the spokesperson said. He was later assigned to a training ship in Hiroshima.

"During their service, members of the Self-Defence Force train with live ammunition once a year. They also do breakdowns and maintenance of guns," a senior navy officer told Reuters.

"But as they are following orders when they do it, it's hard to believe they gain enough knowledge to be able make guns," he said. Even army soldiers who serve "for a long time don't know how to make guns".

Some time after leaving the navy, Yamagami registered with a staffing company and in late 2020 started work at a factory in Kyoto as a forklift operator, the Mainichi newspaper reported.

He had no problems until the middle of April, when he missed work without permission and then told his boss he wanted to quit, the newspaper said. He used up his holidays and finished on May 15.

(With inputs from Reuters)