Takahiro Shiraishi was hanged for the murders of eight ladies and one man whose physique elements he hid in his small residence.
Japan has executed a person who was discovered responsible of killing and dismembering 9 folks he made contact with on social media, the primary use of capital punishment within the nation in almost three years.
Takahiro Shiraishi was hanged on Friday after he was sentenced to dying for the 2017 murders of eight ladies and one man in his residence in Zama metropolis in Kanagawa close to Tokyo.
He was dubbed the “Twitter killer” as he had contacted his victims by way of the social media platform, now often called X.
Shiraishi admitted to committing the murders after reaching out and providing to assist folks – who have been considering suicide – to die. He had stashed bits of the our bodies of his 9 victims in coolers round his small residence, in accordance with media experiences.
Justice Minister Keisuke Suzuki, who authorised Shiraishi’s hanging, mentioned he made the choice after cautious examination of the case, taking into consideration the convict’s “extraordinarily egocentric” motive for crimes that “induced nice shock and unrest to society”.
The execution on Friday was the primary in Japan since July 2022 of a person sentenced to dying for a stabbing rampage in Tokyo’s Akihabara procuring district in 2008.
It was additionally the primary time the dying penalty was carried out since Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba’s authorities was inaugurated final October.
Final September, a Japanese courtroom acquitted Iwao Hakamada, who had spent the world’s longest time on dying row. The courtroom discovered he was wrongfully convicted of crimes dedicated almost 60 years in the past.
One of many highest-profile executions in Japan was carried out in 2018 of the guru Shoko Asahara and 12 former members of the Aum Shinrikyo doomsday cult, which orchestrated the 1995 sarin gasoline assaults on Tokyo’s subway system that killed 14 folks and made 1000’s sick.
Capital punishment is carried out by hanging in Japan, and prisoners are notified of their execution simply hours earlier than it’s carried out, which has lengthy been decried by human rights teams for the stress it places on death-row prisoners.
Japan and the USA are the one two members of the Group of Seven industrialised economies to retain the dying penalty.
There may be robust public assist for the observe in Japan. A authorities survey in 2024 of 1,800 respondents discovered that 83 % considered the dying penalty as “unavoidable”.