A death sentence was carried out in Japan for the first time since July 2022, Kyodo reported, quoted by BTA.
Takahiro Shiraishi, who killed nine people in the city of Zama, in central Kanagawa prefecture, in 2017. The thirty-four-year-old man then dismembered the bodies of his victims and stored them in his apartment in a suburb of the capital Tokyo.
Shiraishi became known as the "Twitter Killer", as he met his victims, who were prone to suicide, on this social network. He killed a total of eight women and one man.
His death sentence was confirmed in 2021. It was carried out today by hanging.
Japan is one of the few developed countries where there is a death penalty. Otherwise, more than 1,500 executions were carried out around the world last year - the most since 2015, according to the human rights organization "Amnesty International".
Shiraishi was hanged amid debates in Japan on the issue of death sentences, sparked by the acquittal of an elderly man who received the heaviest punishment more than four decades ago for a quadruple murder committed in 1966, Kyodo notes. The retrial of 89-year-old Iwao Hakamata ended in October last year with his acquittal.