Former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Japan’s longest-serving leader, died on Friday hours after he was shot while campaigning for a parliamentary election, shocking a country in which political violence is rare and guns are tightly controlled.
Japan’s former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was shot as he gave a campaign speech Friday in western Japan and airlifted to a hospital, but the country’s national public broadcaster NHK said later that he had succumbed to his injuries. Multiple Japanese and international news outlets cited officials from Abe’s political party and the regional hospital where he was treated as confirming his death.
The shooter opened fire on Abe, 67, from behind as the former premier addressed members of the public on a drab traffic island in the western city of Nara. Japanese media reported that the weapon appeared to be a homemade gun.
It was the first killing of a sitting or former Japanese leader since a 1936 coup attempt, when several figures including two ex-premiers were assassinated.
Chief Cabinet Secretary Hirokazu Matsuno told reporters that police had arrested a male suspect at the scene of the attack. “A barbaric act like this is absolutely unforgivable, no matter what the reasons are, and we condemn it strongly,” Matsuno said.
He bled to death from deep wounds to the heart and the right side of his neck, despite receiving more than 100 units of blood in transfusions over four hours, Hidetada Fukushima, the professor in charge of emergency medicine at Nara Medical University Hospital, told a televised news conference.
Current Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, who belongs to the same political party as Abe, returned to Tokyo by helicopter from his own campaign destination of Yamagata, in northern Japan. He told reporters earlier that he was “not aware of the motives and background behind this attack, but this attack is an act of brutality that happened during the elections — the very foundation of our democracy — and is absolutely unforgivable.”
Author: Editorial Staff
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