Japan executed a man on Friday who killed nine people after contacting them on social media, the first use of the death penalty in the country in almost three years.
Takahiro Shiraishi had been sentenced to death for his suffocation and degradation of eight women and a man in his apartment in Zama City in Kanagawa near Tokyo. He was called “Twitter Killer” when he contacted the victims via the social media platform.
Justice Minister Keisuke Suzuki, who authorized Shiraishi’s hanging, said that after careful investigation, he decided to take into account the “extremely selfish” motif of crimes of criminal offense that “caused great shock and turmoil to society.”
It followed the execution in July 2022 by a man walking on a stabbing in Tokyo’s shopping district of Akihabara in 2008.
It was also the first time that a death penalty has been implemented since Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba’s government was inaugurated last October.
Last September, a Japanese court acquitted Iwao Hakamada, which had spent the world’s longest time on the death of the death of an wrongful conviction for crimes committed almost 60 years ago.
The death penalty is carried out by hanging in Japan, and prisoners are told of their execution hours before it is performed, which has long been decorated by human rights groups for the stress it puts on prisoners.
“It is not appropriate to abolish the death penalty while these violent crimes are still committed,” Suzuki told a press conference. There are currently 105 deaths inmates in Japan, he added.
