Image: Reuters Berita 24 English - The president of the nation's Unification Church said on Monday that the mother of the murder suspe...
 |
| Image: Reuters |
Berita 24 English - The president of the nation's Unification Church said on Monday that the mother of the murder suspect is a member as a result of a police probe into the death of former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.
Police have named Tetsuya Yamagami, a 41-year-old unemployed man, as the shooter who approached Abe on Friday when he was giving a campaign address and started firing.
According to Kyodo news agency, which cited investigative sources, Yamagami felt Abe had supported a religious organisation to whom his mother had given a "large donation."
The Yomiuri newspaper and other media have reported that the suspect informed authorities his mother went bankrupt after that.
The Unification Church, also known as the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification, has a Japanese branch. Its president, Tomihiro Tanaka, revealed to reporters in Tokyo that the suspect's mother is a church member. On her donations, he refrained from commenting.
Tanaka stated that neither Abe nor the alleged murderer were members. He said that Abe was not a consultant to the church.
A fervent anti-communist and self-declared messiah, Sun Myung Moon formed the Unification Church in South Korea in 1954.
Because it weds thousands of couples at once in mass weddings, it has attracted media attention on a global scale.
Daily newspapers from South Korea, Japan, and the United States are among the church's affiliates. Moon established the conservative Washington Times newspaper and commanded a vast corporate empire.
Reuters was unable to get in touch with Yamagami's mother and was unable to find out if she belonged to any other religious groups.
According to the church's website, Abe, a conservative, spoke at a gathering sponsored by a group linked with it in September and praised the affiliate's efforts to bring about peace on the Korean peninsula.
Critics have long alleged that the church is a cult and questioned its allegedly shady financial dealings. Such ideas are rejected by the church, which asserts that it is a valid religious movement.
The suspect claimed to have a vendetta against a certain organisation, and police have corroborated this, although they have not named the organisation.
SOLID LIFE
On Monday, Reuters went to Yamagami's mother's house in Nara. The white house is hidden away at the end of a peaceful cul-de-sac in a wealthy neighbourhood, just one rail stop from the location of Abe's murder. She didn't seem to be in her house. An unmarked automobile with two uniformed police officers sitting outside.
A neighbour who only identified herself by her last name, Ishii, claimed to have never met the family and had only ever greeted the mother.
She said, "I don't see her around often, I say hi, but that is all. It seems like the mother leads a quiet life."
The mother had lived alone for a long time, according to another neighbour, an 87-year-old woman who only supplied her last name as Tanida.
Initially joining the church in 1998, Yamagami's mother stopped going between 2009 and 2017, according to Tanaka. She re-established contact with church members approximately two to three years ago, and in the past six months or so, he added, she has been attending church functions about once a month.
Tanaka claimed that it was only after speaking to the mother's relatives that the church became aware of her financial struggles. He said that he had no idea what led to those challenges.
On Monday, Nara police announced that they had discovered what seemed to be bullet holes at a church building and that the suspect had admitted to them that the day before he shot Abe, he had fired practise shots at the location.
GRANDFATHER OF ABE
Tanaka claimed that Abe had shown support for the church's international peace effort in messages conveyed at events hosted by church affiliates.
According to the church's publications, Moon, who was proficient in Japanese, established the International Federation for Victory Over Communism in Japan in the late 1960s and cultivated relationships with Japanese officials.
The International Federation for Victory Over Communism stated on its website that Nobusuke Kishi, Abe's maternal grandfather and a former prime minister, served as an honorary executive chair at a group banquet hosted by Moon.
2012 saw Moon's passing. Out of the church's 10 million members worldwide, roughly 600,000 are believed to be members in Japan, according to a church spokesperson.
