A death sentence was executed by hanging in Japan, the first application of the capital punishment since July 2022 in the country, NHK public television announced on Friday and several other national media. The Ministry of Justice, contacted by AFP, refused to confirm the information before a press conference. According to local media, it is Takahiro Shiraishi, 34, sentenced at the end of 2020 for the murder of nine people committed in 2017.
The man aimed at Internet users who mentioned online suicidal projects by telling them that he could help them, and even die alongside them. Takahiro Shiraishi had admitted having killed and massacred his young victims, all women, except one. During the trial, his lawyers had pleaded for life, believing that his victims, aged 15 to 26, had expressed suicidal thoughts on social networks, and had thus agreed to their death. The court had not retained this argument, judging that the case has “Provided great anxiety in society, because social networks are so widespread”and had condemned him to the death penalty by hanging, the only practice used in Japan for capital punishment. He had given up appealing.
A real horrors house
Takahiro Shiraishi had dismembered the corpses and stored them in his apartment in Zama, in the large southwest suburbs of Tokyo. On October 31, 2017, the police discovered a real house of horrors at his house: 240 pieces of human remains hidden in coolers and tool boxes, sprinkled with cat litter to try to hide the smells of putrefaction. Schools, knives, a saw and various carpentry tools had been found at his home. This case had shocked Japan, a country where the crime rate is very low, and had also had a strong international impact.
Police had finally arrested her as she was investigating the disturbing disappearance of a 23 -year -old woman, whose brother had been able to connect to his Twitter account, where he had noticed exchanges with a suspect account. Which had proven to be one of those used by Shiraishi to present themselves as a “Professional executioner”. Before becoming a murderer, this man with an ordinary and erased appearance had worked for a few years as a recruiter of young women for adult clubs in Kabukicho, the large red district of Tokyo.
The “Twitter killer” affair, as the Japanese press had nicknamed it, had rekindled debates on the control of social networks in Japan as well as on suicide and its prevention. Japan has the highest suicide rate among the industrialized countries of the G7. Japan is the only developed country, apart from the United States, to apply the death penalty, usually for people convicted of multiple homicides. The authorities justify its maintenance by the support it enjoys among the population, despite criticism from abroad, in particular human rights organizations.
