A Japanese man who was definitively sentenced to the death penalty in 2015 for having killed seven people in the streets of Akihabara, an electronics district in Tokyo in 2008, has been executed, announced Tuesday July 26 local media including the public channel NHK .
Aged 25 at the time of the incident, Tomohiro Kato had knowingly hit passers-by with a heavy weight before attacking people in the crowd with a dagger. Seven people had lost their lives, ten others had been injured.
The death sentence was upheld by the Court of Appeal in September 2012 after a first instance verdict in March 2011, and Japan’s Supreme Court rejected Mr Kato’s appeal in 2015, making the sentence final.
The convict, at the time a temporary worker in an auto parts manufacturing plant in a small town in central Japan, had learned shortly before the massacre that his contract would end at the end of June 2008. Housed by his employer, he was also going to lose his apartment and had confided on the internet that he feared becoming homeless.
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During a hearing, Tomohiro Kato had also explained that he had committed this crime because of criticism of which he had been the object on the internet. After the massacre, Japanese authorities banned the possession of double-edged daggers with blades longer than 5.5 centimeters.
Requested by Agence France-Presse, the Ministry of Justice was unable to confirm his execution immediately.
It is the first application of the death penalty in Japan since last December, when three people sentenced to death for murder were executed by hanging on the same day.
Japan is, along with the United States, one of the last industrialized and democratic countries to still resort to the death penalty, a sentence widely supported by Japanese public opinion.