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Japan has executed a death row prisoner, public broadcaster NHK and other media outlets said today, the first time since 2022 that the country has enacted capital punishment.

The Justice Ministry declined to confirm the hanging but NHK, citing government sources, said the prisoner was 34-year-old Takahiro Shiraishi, who murdered nine people in 2017.

Shiraishi – dubbed the “Twitter killer” – was sentenced to death for murdering and dismembering nine people he met on the social media platform, now called X.

Shiraishi is said to have lured his mostly female victims, aged between 15 and 26, to his apartment near Tokyo, where he killed them and cut up their bodies.

He admitted murdering all nine, having made contact with suicidal victims on Twitter and offered to help them die, before stashing bits of bodies in coolers around his small apartment, according to media reports.

Japan and the United States are the only two members of the Group of Seven industrialised economies to retain the death penalty.

There is overwhelming public support for the practice, and a 2024 Japanese Government survey of 1800 respondents showed 83% saw the death penalty as “unavoidable”.

In 2022, Tomohiro Kato was hanged for an attack in 2008 in which he rammed a rented two-tonne truck into a crowd in Tokyo’s Akihabara district, before getting out and going on a stabbing spree in an attack that killed seven people.

“I came to Akihabara to kill people. It didn’t matter who I’d kill,” he told police at the time.

As of December 2023, some 107 prisoners were waiting for their death sentences to be carried out, the Justice Ministry told AFP. It is always done by hanging.

The law stipulates that executions must be carried out within six months of a final verdict after appeals are exhausted.

In reality, however, most inmates are left on tenterhooks in solitary confinement for years – and sometimes decades – causing severe consequences for their mental health.

There is widespread criticism of the system and the Government’s lack of transparency over the practice.

Inmates are often informed of their impending death at the last minute, typically in the early morning before it happens.

The high-profile executions of the guru Shoko Asahara and 12 former members of the Aum Shinrikyo doomsday cult took place in 2018.

Aum Shinrikyo orchestrated the 1995 sarin gas attacks on Tokyo’s subway system, killing 14 people and making thousands more ill.

-Agence France-Presse