Yesterday, former Prime Minister of Japan Shinzo Abe was attending a campaign event in the city of Nara when a man shot him twice in the back with a homemade shotgun.
Abe was rushed to hospital, still alive, but apparently “unresponsive”. A short while later he was declared dead.
Footage of the incident has been uploaded to various video platforms:
- The alleged shooter has been named as 41-year-old Tetsuya Yamagami, an unemployed former-sailor in the Japanese navy.
He supposedly used a home-made shotgun, which was retrieved at the scene:
So far no political motive has been claimed – in fact barely any motive at all.
- Police claim Yamagami has confessed to the shooting, and that he hates “a certain group” with which Abe is affiliated, but have declined the name the group.
Essentially, right now there are lot more unanswered questions than answered ones.
Is there anything that shows the “official narrative to be false? Not yet, that we have seen. But the literal centuries of past precedent say lone lunatics are rarely the latter and never the former.
There’s already one familiar trope here, with the suspect having ties to the military, but that is far from conclusive.
- Abe has ties to the World Economic Forum of course…but so does every politician of note, really.
However, if that “certain group” is revealed to be the WEF, then this incident can be turned into a warning against “online conspiracy theories” spreading “hate” about financial institutions and so on.
- But that’s all speculation at this point.
As always with this kind of breaking news, the real story may be the reaction that has yet to happen, and the real truth may get buried as the “official story” is refined and revised over the next few days.
We would invite you to post anything you find of interest in the comments below, or head over to the Corbett Report, where James has opened up one of his trademarked open-source investigations.
- Political assassinations – especially of (former) heads of state – are very rare. It will be interesting to see just where this goes.
Source: Off-Guardian