Tomohiro Kato had darkened in broad daylight on passers -by with a truck before leaving the vehicle and stabbing people at random in the crowd, killing seven people and ten injured with a double -edged blade.
Le Monde with AFP
A Japanese definitively condemned to the death penalty in 2015 for killing seven people in the streets of Akihabara, an electronics district in Tokyo in 2008, was executed, announced on Tuesday July 26 of local media including the Public channel NHK.
aged 25 at the time of the facts, Tomohiro Kato had knowingly struck passers -by with a heavyweight before attacking, with a dagger, people in the crowd. Seven people had lost their lives, ten others had been injured.
The capital sentence had been confirmed by the Court of Appeal in September 2012 after a first instance verdict pronounced in March 2011, and the Supreme Court of Japan had rejected Mr. Kato’s appeal in 2015, rendering the sentence final.
The condemned, at the temporary worker era in a manufacturing plant for cars in a small town in the center of Japan, had learned shortly before the massacre that his contract was going to end at the end of June 2008. Logged by housed His employer, he was also going to lose his apartment and had entrusted on the internet to fear becoming homeless.
First execution since December 2021
During an audience, Tomohiro Kato also explained that he had committed this crime due to criticism of which he had been the subject on the Internet. After the massacre, the Japanese authorities prohibited the possession of double-edged stabbings whose blade exceeds 5.5 centimeters.
Solicited by the France-Presse agency, the Ministry of Justice was unable to confirm its execution in the immediate future.
This is the first application of the capital punishment in Japan since last December, when three sentenced to death for murders had been executed by hanging on the same day.
Japan is, with the United States, one of the last industrialized and democratic countries to still use capital pain, a sentence widely supported by Japanese public opinion.