On Tuesday, July 12, the funeral of former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe took place in Japan. He was killed on July 8 in the city of Nara while speaking to voters. The killer was arrested at the same place of the assassination attempt.
It turned out to be 41-year-old local resident Tetsuya Yamagami.
Thousands of people came to lead the influential politician on their last journey. They stood along the entire path followed by the funeral procession. Abe’s body was carried in a closed black hearse.
The ceremony itself was private. Shinzo Abe was brought to a Buddhist temple in Tokyo. Only relatives and close friends of the deceased were allowed into its territory.
From the temple, the body was taken to the Kirigaya Funeral Hall. There was a cremation according to Buddhist traditions.
Meanwhile, Yamagami named a motive for the murder. He stated that he committed the assassination because of Shinzo Abe’s connection with “a certain religious group” that allegedly brought his mother Tetsuya to bankruptcy.
The killer claims that the mother donated large sums, as a result of which she went bankrupt herself and put the entire family in a difficult financial situation. Yamagami originally planned to kill the leader of this religious group, but then changed his plan and made an assassination attempt on Abe, who, according to him, promoted the ideas of this religious group in Japan.
Local media are sure that this is a religious organization known as the Unification Church or Moon’s sect. So it is called by the name of the founder, the South Korean religious leader Sun Myung Moon.
Unification Church representatives have confirmed that Yamagami’s mother has been regularly attending the organization’s meetings for several years. However, they refused to discuss the issue of donations allegedly made by the woman. At the same time, they referred to the police, which had not yet completed the investigation.
Tetsuya Yamagami served in the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force in the early 2000s. In 2020, he joined a factory in the Kansai region, but left in May of this year. During the search, they found homemade firearms and explosives. There is reason to believe that Tetsuya also planned an explosion in a public place. As a murder weapon, he used a homemade double-barreled shotgun.
