The first images of the attack perpetrated against the former Prime Minister of Japan, Shinzo Abe, show that the weapon used by the alleged attacker, already arrested, was a homemade pistol. In them it is seen that the attacker had a kind of black “shoulder strap”: it would consist of two rods joined and wrapped in black insulating tape. A kind of “shotgun”, which the detainee tried to camouflage in some way.
Japanese police have identified Yamagami Tetsuya, a 41-year-old unemployed man and former member of the Maritime Self-Defense Forces (Japanese Army), as the alleged assailant.
Tetsuya, from the city of Nara, in western Japan, was arrested for attempted murder while holding a weapon with which he would have shot the former Japanese president twice.
According to sources from the Japanese Ministry of Defense, the alleged aggressor worked in the naval branch of the Self-Defense Forces, in charge of defending the archipelago, for three years until 2005.
The question now is, how did he get the gun? Gun violence is very rare in Japan, and guns are extremely difficult to own.
The answer seems to be that he may have built it himself. Photographs taken while the suspect was being detained show what appears to be a makeshift or homemade double-barreled shotgun.
However, there is a long tradition of homemade weapons used by guerrillas, but also by militants and street gangs. Sometimes simple tubes with a spring and hammer, in other situations something more sophisticated, reports Corriere della Sera. In the 2019 synagogue attack in Halle, Germany, a neo-Nazi used a self-made submachine gun and shotgun. Burmese insurgents have developed several, the same for criminal groups operating in Brazilian favelas.
Famous is the story of Phil Luty, a British right-wing extremist who specialized in the design of these rudimentary weapons and became a source of inspiration for the construction of said weapons.
The former Japanese president was shot in the back on Friday while offering a campaign speech on the street near a train station in the city of Nara.
The conservative leader was today at a campaign event for the partial elections to the Upper House of the Diet (Parliament of Japan) that are held this Sunday, in which the Liberal Democratic Party (PLD) of Abe and the current prime minister , Fumio Kishida, hopes to revalidate his vast majority.
Election rallies are usually held in Japan in the middle of the street and with few security measures, due to the low rate of crime and attacks with firearms typical of the Asian country.
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