Shinzo Abe’s killer confessed why he planned the attack and told how he made the homemade weapon

Tetsuya Yamagami, arrested for the murder of Shinzo Abe, confessed to having started planning his attack on the former Japanese prime minister on last fall -mid September- and revealed what was the reason that had prompted him to commit the crime. He also told how he made the homemade shotgun.

According to Yamagami, a former member of the Japanese maritime force, who explained to the police authorities, he decided to attack Abe for his alleged links with a religious organization called the Unification Church, which would have caused family problems of an economic nature.

Investigators believe he attempted to assassinate Abe after seeing a video message recorded by the former president last September for an organization affiliated with the church of the unificationwhich Yamagami “hated”, according to the local press.

The Japanese branch of the Unification Church confirmed this the day before Yamagami’s mother was part of this group known as the “Moon” sect.although he avoided commenting on the alleged donations the woman would have made to the organization and that they would have made failedAccording to the detainee’s report.

Additionally, Yamagami also told police that his idea was initially to attack some leader of the religious organization, before targeting Abe as his target.

He also remembered it he had attempted to assassinate Shinzo Abe in another political speech he had delivered the day before the tragedy, but was unable to enter the auditorium because access was limited. That’s why she achieved his goal of him the next day, when Abe spoke standing in the middle of the street and in front of a train station, in the western city of Nara.

Yamagami went to the scene an hour and a half before the attack, according to images captured by security cameras, apparently looking for an optimal location to carry out his plans.

The attacker approached Abe from behind and shot him the first time from a distance of seven meters, and the second time from five meters. He used a weapon similar to a homemade shotgun.

The murder weapon consisted of two metal tubes tied together and mounted on a wooden panel, and it was capable of firing up to six bullets with each shotwhich gave him greater precision and lethality, according to the prisoner himself.

Yamagami started making his own weapons about a year ago, inspired by the videos he found online and also acquired the gunpowder used in the attack via the internetas reported to the authorities.

What is the “Moon” sect and why is it linked to the murder of Shinzo Abe

The killer himself explained that his attack on Shinzo Abe was a revenge for Abe’s support for the so-called Unification Church, better known as the “Moon Sect”, to which his mother donated money.

What is the lunar sect? The religious group was founded in Korea in the middle of the last century by Sun Myung Moon, who passed away in 2012. At that time, the sect had three million followers, who proclaimed it the True Father.

For decades the sect was famous for organizing mass weddings, with thousands of couples joining together in gigantic sports stadiums.

Sun Myung Moon was born into a peasant family in present-day North Korea. At the age of 15 he claimed to have had a vision of Jesus Christ asking him to continue his mission for humanity to reach a state of “sinless” purity.

After founding his church in Seoul in 1954, Moon entered politics early, initially taking a clearly anti-Communist line and attracting the sympathy of the South Korean military regime of the time.

Moon has also dealt with foreign heads of state, such as Richard Nixon in the United States, who he supported during the Watergate scandal. In France in the 1980s, his church had brief ties to the far-right movement of the National Front.

The organization gradually became an economic empire present in various sectors (construction, food, automobile, tourism, media …), which made its founder a billionaire.

Sun Myung Moon embarked on his first world tour in 1965 and settled in the United States in the 1970s. Convicted of tax evasion, he spent more than a year in prison in the United States in the early 1980s.

Today the Reunification Church is controlled by the widow of its founder, Hak Ja Han, his second wife, with whom he had a dozen children.

With information from EFE.