A 39-year-old Japanese man sentenced to death for killing seven people in the streets of Akihabara, Tokyo’s electronics district in June 2008, was executed on Tuesday July 26, the Japanese justice ministry announced.
25 years old at the time, Tomohiro Kato drove a two-tonne truck into passers-by in broad daylight before getting out of the vehicle and stabbing random people in the crowd with a double-edged blade, killing seven people. and ten wounded.
Read alsoSingapore: Fifth execution for drug trafficking since March
SEE ALSO – Burmese junta executions ‘sign of depravity’, Human Rights Watch says
“Meticulous preparations”
He told police he was “tired of living» and that he had come «to kill anyone“. Tomohiro Kato’s act was the result of “meticulous preparationsand the convict showed “deliberate intent to killJustice Minister Yoshihisa Furukawa said at a press conference Tuesday in Tokyo. “The death sentence was confirmed by sufficient deliberations during the trials. Based on this, I approved the execution after careful consideration“, he added. “This is a very painful case that had led to extremely serious consequences and shocked society“, further estimated Yoshihisa Furukawa.
The death sentence was upheld by the Court of Appeal in September 2012 after a first instance verdict in March 2011, and Japan’s Supreme Court rejected Tomohiro Kato’s appeal in 2015, making the sentence final. The son of a banker, Tomohiro Kato grew up in Aomori, studying in the best high school in this department in northeastern Japan, then opting for a professional course to work in the automobile industry. At the time of the events, he was a temporary worker in an auto parts factory in a small town in central Japan, and had learned shortly before the massacre that his contract would end at the end of June 2008. Housed by his employer , he was also going to lose his apartment and had confided on the internet to fear becoming homeless. Before taking action, he had sent dozens of messages on an internet forum, via his mobile phone, describing his intentions in detail. “I will kill people in Akihabara. I will rush my vehicle into the crowd and if it becomes useless I will use a knife. Good-bye to all“, he had written a few hours before the attack.
Read alsoTwo drug traffickers hanged in Singapore
SEE ALSO – Beijing calls Taiwanese vice president’s visit to Japan “political manipulation”
Weapons regulations
During a hearing, Tomohiro Kato had also explained that he had committed this crime because of criticism of which he had been the object on the internet. Prosecutors say Tomohiro Kato’s self-esteem also suffered when a woman he was communicating with online stopped writing to him, after he sent her a photograph of himself. After his arrest at the scene of the attack, Tomohiro Kato had written to a 56-year-old taxi driver injured in the attack to express his regret, and also issued an apology during his trial. Following this crime, which occurred seven years to the day after the massacre committed by a man armed with a butcher’s knife in an elementary school in Osaka (west), the Japanese authorities had banned the possession of double-edged daggers whose the blade exceeds 5.5 centimeters.
Read alsoBurma: Blinken condemns executions aimed at “annihilating democracy”
Tomohiro Kato’s execution is the first application of the death penalty in Japan since last December, when three people sentenced to death for murder were executed by hanging on the same day. Japan is, along with the United States, one of the last industrialized and democratic countries to still resort to the death penalty, a sentence widely supported by Japanese public opinion. The Japanese government thinks it is “notnot appropriateto abolish the death penalty, taking into account the fact that “heinous crimes like mass shootings and murders during armed robberies still occur frequently“, said Tuesday the Japanese Minister of Justice.