Japan nationwide police chief resigns over Shinzo Abe assassination

Japan’s nationwide police chief has resigned from the submit on Thursday taking duty for the deadly taking pictures of former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe at a marketing campaign speech final month.

National Police Agency Chief Itaru Nakamura’s announcement got here as his company launched a report on the way it failed to guard Abe’s life on July 8 when he was assassinated in Nara in western Japan.

The police report discovered holes in Abe’s police safety that allowed the attacker to shoot him from behind.

Nakamura mentioned he took the previous prime minister’s loss of life significantly and that he submitted his resignation to the National Public Safety Commission earlier on Thursday.

READ | Zip gun, the handmade gun used to kill former Japan PM Shinzo Abe

“In order to fundamentally reexamine guarding and never to let this happen, we need to have a new system,” Nakamura informed a information convention as he introduced his intention to step down.

The alleged gunman, Tetsuya Yamagami, was arrested on the scene and is at the moment below psychological analysis till late November. Yamagami informed police that he focused Abe due to the previous chief’s hyperlink to the Unification Church, which he hated.

Abe despatched a video message final 12 months to a gaggle affiliated with the church, which specialists say could have infuriated the taking pictures suspect.

Abe’s household paid tribute to him in a non-public Buddhist ritual Thursday marking the forty ninth day of his assassination.

In Nara, prefectural police chief Tomoaki Onizuka additionally expressed his intention to step down over Abe’s assassination.

ALSO READ | Shinzo Abe: All it is advisable to learn about Japan’s longest-serving prime minister

The church, which was based in South Korea in 1954 and got here to Japan a decade later, has constructed shut ties with a bunch of conservative lawmakers, a lot of them members of Abe’s Liberal Democratic Party on their shared pursuits of anti-communism.

Since the Nineteen Eighties, the church has confronted accusations of problematic recruiting and spiritual gross sales in Japan, and the governing occasion’s church ties have despatched help scores of Prime Minister Fumio Kishida’s Cabinet right into a nosedive even after its latest shuffle.

— ENDS —