The assassination of former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe
At approximately 11:30am local time on July 8 2022, former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was shot from behind by a lone gunman while giving an election campaign speech in the southern city of Nara, east of Osaka.He was pronounced dead at 17:03 local time.
Police arrested 41-year-old Tetsuya Yamagami at the scene and he admitted to shooting Abe.Yamagami used a homemade gun to carry out the shooting motivated, according to reports, by his belief that Abe was linked to a specific, possibly religious, group he hated. Police have not released the name of the group.
In the immediate aftermath of the attack, Abe was evacuated from the scene by ambulance and then airlifted to Nara Medical University hospital via helicopter.
According to reports, while Yamagami denied political motivations for carrying out the shooting, he did tell police investigators that the attack had been planned for months.Investigative sources have also indicated that Yamagami went to Okayama one day prior, where Abe was giving another campaign speech though the reason is not known.
The weapon used in the shooting appeared to be a handmade gun with cylindrical metal barrels wrapped in black tape that measured 40 centimeters long and 20 centimeters wide.
Police confiscated several other handmade weapons after a search of the suspect’s house.According to some reports, explosives were also found on the premises.
Shootings are extremely rare in Japan due to strict gun ownership laws.According to the National Police Agency, Japan reported 10 firearm related incidents in 2021, with one fatality, which is a small number relative to Japan’s large population.
Japanese officials, including former Prime Ministers, are protected by a special branch of the Tokyo Police.These plainclothes officers, called SPs (Security Police), typically stay close to the dignitary to safeguard against physical threats. Dignitaries in Japan typically travel with modest security details focused primarily on direct physical threats.
According to reports, Abe was protected at the rally by one armed specialized police officer and some other local offices. Nara police have not stated how many police officers were deployed for Abe’s security.
When he was shot, Abe was standing at an intersection outside of a train station.He was facing a crowd of hundreds while, at the same time, buses and vans passed behind him on the road where the assailant appeared.
Photos circulated in the aftermath of the shooting show that the suspect was able to reach within a few meters of Abe without any sort of checks or barriers.
The security plan for the campaign event was drafted by the Nara prefectural police and will be reviewed by Japan’s National Police Agency.
- Abe was the longest serving Prime Minister of Japan, stepping down rather recently, in 2020, citing health issues.He was still among the most prominent and influential politicians in Japan. While we do not know if there was any intelligence regarding threats against Abe, dignitary protection requires, at least, a base level of security, particularly when there are a relatively few number of targets and a wide range of potential motives. In this case, that base level of security obviously failed.
- Even if there were constraints on the number of trained security officers who could travel with Abe, the number of deployed security personnel on the ground could and should have been supplemented by local law enforcement.Had a sufficient number of security personnel been deployed, and properly deployed, it may have deterred or foiled the attack. Video footage appears to show that while there was security deployed around Abe, there was no one facing backward where people and vehicles were moving freely.
- According to reports, no one, including security personnel on site, understood what was happening until the second shot was fired.Based on video footage of the assassination, the first shot appeared to have missed Abe. Had security reacted to the first gunshot, the outcome of this attack could have been different. The lack of an immediate response is an indication of the level of training and emergency planning.
- We believe that as a result of strict gun laws combined with the extremely low incidents of gun crimes or political violence, it appears as though armed assaults are not high on the plausible threat criteria for Japanese law enforcement.That said, this incident demonstrates that even strict gun laws and the rarity of events clearly do not preclude the possibility of an armed assault, in this case using an improvised homemade weapon. While the use of improvised weapons are not always an effective modus operandi, the situation on the ground changes when an assailant is able to get within such close proximity of the ‘target,’ i.e., the dignitary, and a single shot may be all that is needed.
- A number of parallels may be drawn between the assassination of former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and the assassination of Israel’s Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin on November 4, 1995 immediately following a rally in Tel Aviv in support of the Oslo peace process.Rabin was en route to his vehicle when he was shot from behind by a lone gunman who was able to enter what should have been a protected zone behind the venue. The Rabin assassination was a watershed event for how protective security is carried out in Israel.
We know that a visible security or police presence has a deterrence effect on potential assailants. Just weeks before the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, Yigal Amir, Rabin’s assassin, attempted to enter an engagement attended by Rabin, though he was deterred by a visible security presence. During the post-attack investigation, Yigal Amir acknowledged that had security told him to leave the premises on the night of the assassination, he would have left without incident.
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