By Tim Kelly

NARA, Japan -The man arrested for Shinzo Abe’s killing believed the former Japanese leader was linked to a religious group he blamed for his mother’s financial ruin and spent months planning the attack with a homemade gun, police told local media on Saturday.

Tetsuya Yamagami, an unemployed 41-year-old, was identified by police as the suspect who approached Japan’s longest-serving prime minister from behind and opened fire, an attack that was captured on video and shocked a nation where gun violence is rare.

Wiry and bespectacled with shaggy hair, the suspect was seen stepping into the road behind Abe, who was standing on a riser at an intersection, before unloading two shots from a 40-cm-long (16-inch) weapon wrapped with black tape. He was tackled by police at the scene.

Yamagami was a loner who did not reply when spoken to, neighbours told Reuters. He believed Abe had promoted a religious group that his mother made a “huge donation” to, Kyodo news agency said, citing investigative sources.

He told police his mother went bankrupt from the donation, the Yomiuri newspaper and other media reported.

“My mother got wrapped up in a religious group and I resented it,” Kyodo and others quoted him as telling police. Nara police declined to comment on the details reported by Japanese media of Yamagami’s motive or preparation.

Media have not named the religious group he was reportedly upset with.

Yamagami jury-rigged the weapon from parts bought online, spending months plotting the attack, even attending other Abe campaign events, including one a day earlier some 200 km (miles) away, media said.

He had considered a bomb attack before opting for a gun, according to public broadcaster NHK.

The suspect told police he made guns by wrapping steel pipes together with tape, some of them with three, five or six pipes, with parts he bought online, NHK said.

Police found bullet holes in a sign attached to a campaign van near the site of the shooting and believe they were from Yamagami, police said on Saturday. Videos showed Abe turning toward the attacker after the first shot before crumpling to the ground after the second.

HOSTESS BARS

Yamagami lived on the eighth floor of a building of small flats. The ground floor is full of bars where patrons pay to drink and chat with female hostesses. One karaoke bar has gone out of business.

The elevator stops on only three floors, a cost-saving design. Yamagami would have had to get off and walk up a flight of stairs to his flat.

One of his neighbours, a 69-year-old woman who lived a floor below him, saw him three days before Abe’s assassination.

“I said hello but he ignored me. He was just looking down at the ground to the side not wearing a mask. He seemed nervous,” the woman, who gave only her surname Nakayama, told Reuters. “It was like I was invisible. He seemed like something was bothering him.”

She pays 35,000 yen ($260) a month in rent and reckons her neighbours pay around the same.

A Vietnamese woman living two doors down from Yamagami who gave her name as Mai, said he appeared to keep to himself. “I saw him a couple of times. I bowed to him in the elevator, but he didn’t say anything.”

NAVY GUN EXPERIENCE

A person named Tetsuya Yamagami served in the Maritime Self-Defence Force from 2002 to 2005, a spokesman for Japan’s navy said, declining to say whether this was the suspected killer, as media have reported.

This Yamagami joined a training unit in Sasebo, a major navy base in the southwest, and was assigned to a destroyer artillery section, the spokesperson said. He was later assigned to a training ship in Hiroshima.

“During their service, members of the Self-Defence Force train with live ammunition once a year. They also do breakdowns and maintenance of guns,” a senior navy officer told Reuters.

“But as they are following orders when they do it, it’s hard to believe they gain enough knowledge to be able make guns,” he said. Even army soldiers who serve “for a long time don’t know how to make guns”.

    Some time after leaving the navy, Yamagami registered with a staffing company and in late 2020 started work at a factory in Kyoto as a forklift operator, the Mainichi newspaper reported.

He had no problems until the middle of April, when he missed work without permission and then told his boss he wanted to quit, the newspaper said. He used up his holidays and finished on May 15.

($1 = 136.0800 yen)

(Reporting by Tim Kelly in Nara; Additional reporting by Satoshi Sugiyama in Nara and Nobuhiro Kubo, Chang-Ran Kim and Yukiko Toyoda in Tokyo; Writing by David Dolan; Editing by William Mallard)

By Ju-min Park and Daniel Leussink

TOKYO – The man suspected of killing former Japanese premier Shinzo Abe with a hand-made gun on Friday could have made the weapon in a day or two after obtaining readily available materials such as wood and metal pipes, analysts say.

The attack showed gun violence cannot be totally eliminated even in a country where tough gun laws mean it is nearly unheard of for citizens to buy or own firearms.

There have been some cases in recent years where people illicitly made weapons themselves in Japan. But still, gun crime is very rare in Japan: last year there were 10 shooting incidents, eight involving gangsters, according to police data. One person was killed and four wounded.

“The making of guns with a 3D printer and the manufacturing of bombs can nowadays be learned off the internet from anywhere in the world,” said Mitsuru Fukuda, a Nihon University professor specialised in crisis management and terrorism.

“It can be done in two to three days after obtaining parts such as pipes,” said Fukuda, who analysed images of the gun used in Abe’s shooting.

Video images showed the assailant fired at Abe with a device that had a pistol grip and what appeared to be two pipes covered in black electrical tape. Police arrested a 41-year-old man at the scene and said he had admitted shooting Abe; the suspect was later identified as Tetsuya Yamagami.

“Anyone with a basic understanding of how guns work could have made it with minimum knowledge,” said firearms commentator Tetsuya Tsuda, adding that it may not even have taken half a day to manufacture the weapon used in the attack.

Japanese media said on Saturday the suspect had told investigators he had searched online for instructions how to make firearms, and ordered parts and gunpowder on the internet as well.

The gun measured 40 by 20 centimetres (15.7 by 7.9 inches), and was made of materials such as metal and wood, officials from the Nara prefectoral police told reporters on Friday.

Police did not rule out the possibility that the bullets were also made by hand but said they were still investigating.

Investigators seized what appeared to be five hand-made guns from Yamagami’s house, the Mainichi newspaper reported on Saturday.

SIMPLE TO MAKE

“Crude, yet lethal, craft-produced (…) firearms such as this are simple to make,” said N. R. Jenzen-Jones, an arms and munitions intelligence specialist of the Australia-based Armament Research Services.

The images of the firearm showed that an electrical wire passed through the cap on the end of each pipe.

That pointed to the use of an electric firing mechanism, Jenzen-Jones said.

“The electrical initiation method (…) was likely selected in this case as conventional cartridges are much harder to acquire in Japan than in many other regions,” he added.

There have been several cases in recent years of people arrested in Japan for illegally making firearms.

In 2018, police arrested a 23-year-old man in the western city of Himeji for making a gun and more than 130 bullets at home. Also that year, police detained a 19-year-old university student in Nagoya city for manufacturing explosives as well as a gun with help of a 3D printer.

In 2014, police arrested a 27-year-old man for illegally possessing handguns made by a 3D printer in Kawasaki, south of Tokyo.

The issue of illicit weapons making is not confined to Japan. For example, officials in Spain found a replica assault rifle and small arms in a raid of an illegal factory discovered to be producing 3D-printing weapons in April 2021.

The suspect in Abe’s shooting told investigators he had manufactured guns with three, five and six metal pipes in addition to the one he used in the attack, media said.

Arms specialist Jenzen-Jones said the weapon used in the incident was at the lower end of the capability spectrum.

“Nonetheless, it was clearly lethal,” he added.

(Reporting by Ju-min Park and Daniel Leussink; Additional reporting by Sakura Murakami; Editing by Frances Kerry)

By Alistair Smout

LONDON -The contest to replace British Prime Minister Boris Johnson gathered pace on Sunday as five more candidates declared their intention to run, with many pledging lower taxes and a clean start from Johnson’s scandal-ridden premiership.

Johnson on Thursday said he would resign as prime minister, after lawmakers and cabinet colleagues rebelled over his handling of a series of scandals, including breaches of lockdown rules in gatherings at his Downing Street office.

He said he would stay on until a new leader was elected.

A member of a Conservative party committee which sets the rules for leadership elections said on Sunday the final result would be announced in September.

Junior trade minister Penny Mordaunt officially declared she was running on Sunday, joining transport Secretary Grant Shapps, finance minister Nadhim Zahawi and former ministers Jeremy Hunt and Sajid Javid, who announced their candidacies for the leadership in time for the Sunday newspapers, taking the total to nine.

“This is a critical inflection point for our country. I believe that a socialist or socialist-led coalition government at the next election would be a disaster for the UK,” Mordaunt said in a statement. “We must win the next election.”

The Conservative Party’s 1922 Committee of legislators, which sets rules for the party in parliament, will set out the exact timetable after a meeting on Monday.

Bob Blackman, an officer on the 1922 Committee’s executive, said that nominations would close on Tuesday evening, followed by a process to whittle candidates down to a final two by July 21.

Party members would elect a new party leader over the summer, who would then become prime minister.

“We’ll (select the final two) by the 21st of July, to allow the party membership sufficient time to have husting sessions and a postal ballot to then lead to a new leader being in place by the fifth of September,” he told Sky News.

LOWER TAX

Entering the race, Shapps, Zahawi, Hunt and Javid all pledged tax cuts, setting them against current favourite, former finance minister Rishi Sunak, whose budget last year put Britain on course for its biggest tax burden since the 1950s.

“I believe in a lower tax, lower regulation, cut-the-red-tape economy,” Shapps told Sky News, adding he would hold an emergency budget to bring forward a one pence reduction in the income tax rate which is currently planned in 2024, freeze a planned rise in corporation tax and look to reduce the size of the civil service.

Hunt, a former foreign minister who came second in the leadership contest in 2019 when Johnson came to office, and Javid, who twice resigned from Johnson’s government, both said they would cut corporation tax to 15%.

Hunt said that no Conservative should either raise taxes or offer unfunded tax cuts. Asked if cutting taxes would lead to inflation, Hunt said: “I don’t agree with that when it comes to business taxes.”

“If you stimulate consumer demand, when there’s some demand-led inflation, there is that risk, but we must bear down on inflation. That’s why I’d be very careful not to promise (tax) cuts that would stoke inflation,” he said.

The Mail on Sunday said Foreign Secretary Liz Truss would launch her campaign on Monday with a promise to cut taxes and tackle the cost-of-living crisis, while one of her main rivals for the role, Defence Secretary Ben Wallace, has ruled himself out.

(Reporting by Alistair Smout; editing by Barbara Lewis and Raissa Kasolowsky)