Tetsuya Yamagami
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Tetsuya Yamagami (Japanese:山上徹也, born September 10th, 1980) is a Japanese Political Assassinator who killed Shinzo Abe with an improvised weapon device.
Overview edit
On July 8th, 2022, Yamagami assassinated former prime minister Shinzo Abe with an improvised double-barreled shotgun, while Abe was making a speech on behalf of a Councillor running for re-election. Abe was transported to a local hospital by an emergency helicopter and was later declared dead.
When asked about his intentions, Yamagami reportedly told investigators that he wanted to kill people associated with religious organizations and that it was not out of spite for Abe's political beliefs.
A person who was seeing Yamagami at the time of the incident testified that he had an eerie impression.
Before assassination edit
Yamagami's mother had become infatuated with the Unification Church in the 1991 after the suicide of her husband in the 1984, and by 1998 had made dozens of large donations to the church. In addition to the funds, this donation also included land formerly owned by her father. As a result, the Yamagami family went bankrupt in 2002, and Yamagami, thinking that the church was responsible for this, planned to take revenge against the church. At first, he planned to assassinate a senior church official, but later decided it was impossible, and switched his target to members of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) with the church as its base support. Although Abe was not a member of the church, he had some contact with the church through the UPF, an organization friendly to the church. Yamagami took notice of this and determined that Abe was a member of the Church. He switched the target of the assassination to Abe.
Yamagami had initially planned to kill using small dynamite, but after experimentation found it impossible because it could involve others the explosion, and the weapons used were switched to firearms. In spring 2020, he had already created some guns based on a video posted on YouTube about how to make guns. Also, the day before the incident, a surveillance camera in Nara with recording recorded what sounded like explosions late at night.
Reaction of Unification Church edit
Unification Church held a press conference in response to the incident, with current church president Tomihiro Tanaka at the conference. During the conference, Tanaka spoke about donations to church and Yamagami's mother as follows:
- Excessive donations have been prevented since 1999 and almost none since the 2000s.
- Donations are not treated like a quota.
- The church does not teach that if you donate money, you will be saved.
- The church has told its members to stop making large donations that would bankrupt.
- Yamagami's mother joined the church in late 1990.
- Information on Yamagami's mother's donations is unclear and not very detailed.
- The church refunded Yamagami's mother 50 million yen between 2005 and 2014.
- After the refund, no donation was received from Yamagami's mother.
On the other hand, former believers have revealed that until recently, before they left the church, they had been told by the church that their ancestors would suffer in hell if they did not donate money to the church and also that they had been forced to buy vases and scriptures at high prices. Also, the church's assertion at the press conference that no donations have come from Yamagami's mother after the 50 million yen refund. but Yamagami's uncle who was interviewed by the media, said that she has continued to donate even after the refund. Thus, there are discrepancies in information between the church side, and ex-church-related and Yamagami-related parties, which has raised doubts about the church's information.
Gallery edit
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Firearm made and used by Tetsuya Yamagami
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Young Tetsuya
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Tetsuya as kid
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Tetsuya unmasked
Trivia edit
- Tetsuya Yamagami, a medical researcher with the same name, was temporarily spread the hoax that he is the same person as the perpetrator of the assassination.
- On August 16, a Japanese comedian spread a rumor on Twitter and YouTube that a "sniper's hut" existed the apartment near the crime scene, and on August 20, he apologized for this post.
- In a now deleted Tweet by French politician Damien Rieu, he accused the far-left for murdering Abe. But instead of using images of the actual murderer, he posted images of Japanese game developer Hideo Kojima.
