Japan executes man convicted of murder for killing and dismembering 9 people in his apartment
Takahiro Shiraishi leaves a police station in Hachioji, suburbs of Tokyo, in November 2017. (Takuya Inaba/Kyodo News via AP, File)
TOKYO — A man convicted of murder for killing and dismembering nine people in his apartment near Tokyo was executed Friday, Japan's Justice Ministry said.
Takahiro Shiraishi, known as the 'Twitter killer,' was sentenced to death in 2020 for the killings in 2017 of the nine victims, most of whom had posted suicidal thoughts on social media. He was also convicted of sexually abusing female victims.
Police arrested him later that year after finding the bodies of eight teenage girls and women as well as one man in cold-storage cases in his apartment.
Investigators said Shiraishi approached the victims via Twitter, offering to assist them with their suicidal wishes. He killed the three teenage girls and five women after raping them. He also killed the boyfriend of one of the women to silence him.
'The case caused the extremely serious outcomes and dealt a major shockwave and unease to the society,' Justice Minister Keisuke Suzuki told an emergency news conference. He said he signed the execution earlier this week, but did not witness Shiraishi's hanging.
The execution was carried out as calls grow to abolish capital punishment or increase transparency in Japan after the acquittal of the world's longest-serving death row inmate Iwao Hakamada last year.
Suzuki justified the need for the execution in Japan, noting a recent government survey shows an overwhelming majority of the public still supports capital punishment, though opposition has somewhat increased.
'I believe it is not appropriate to abolish execution,' Suzuki said, adding there is growing concern about serious crime.
Shiraishi was hanged at the Tokyo Detention House in secrecy with nothing disclosed until the execution was done.
Japan now has 105 people on death row, including 49 seeking retrials, Suzuki said.
Executions are carried out in secrecy in Japan, where prisoners are not even informed of their fate until the morning of their hanging.
Since 2007, Japan has begun disclosing the names of those executed and some details of their crimes, but disclosures are still limited.
Japan and the U.S. are the only two countries in the Group of Seven leading industrialized nations that retain capital punishment.
Japan's most recent execution, in July 2022, was of a man who killed seven people in a vehicle crash and stabbing rampage in a crowded Tokyo shopping district of Akihabara in 2018.
Japan's crime rate is relatively low, but it has seen some high-profile mass killings in recent years.
Mari Yamaguchi, The Associated Press
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
CTV News
7 hours ago
- CTV News
19-year-old man shot dead in Montreal North: 18th murder victim on the island in 2025
The 19-year-old man who was shot and wounded on Friday evening in the borough of Montreal North has succumbed to his injuries. Montreal police (SPVM) confirmed that it is the 18th murder on its territory since the beginning of the year and that the investigation has been assigned to the SPVM's Major Crimes Unit. Police were called to the scene at around 9:15 p.m. on Friday, near the intersection of Maurice-Duplessis Boulevard and Matte Avenue, where a person had been hit by at least one bullet. Upon arrival, they found the victim on the ground, explained SPVM spokesperson Caroline Chèvrefils. The young man, who had been shot in the upper body, was in critical condition when he was transported to a hospital, where he succumbed to his injuries during the night. According to initial reports, a suspect fired at the victim while he was in a vehicle. The suspect fled on foot before the police arrived. No arrests had been made as of Saturday morning, Chèvrefils said. A security perimeter was set up to protect the scene for investigators and forensic technicians. Witnesses to the incident were also interviewed by police. This report by The Canadian Press was first published in French on June 28, 2025.
National Post
10 hours ago
- National Post
Colby Cosh: How Donald Trump nationalized U.S. Steel
Last week, Nippon Steel Corp. of Japan formally completed a takeover of U.S. Steel (USS), the venerable but diminished American industrial giant created by J.P. Morgan in 1901. The Japanese company originally placed its bid for USS in late 2023, but it ran into immediate trouble with the Biden administration. U.S. Steel, once widely regarded as an overmighty pollution-spewing relic of Gilded Age cartelization, had magically evolved to become a vulnerable 'national champion' of morally superior things-making industries; and the company still has a powerful unionized workforce in U.S. rust-belt states that are electorally pivotal. Pennsylvania-born President Joe Biden wasn't going to let a corporate brand virtually synonymous with the city of Pittsburgh be raffled off without a tussle. Article content Article content Government foreign-investment approvals necessarily have this sort of personal-rule character wherever they happen, which is pretty much everywhere. If you want to sell a bundle of industrial assets in Country X to folks from Country Y, you had better have approval from the top political boss of X, whether that approval be tacit or explicit. Article content Article content Article content Still, Biden did go through the motions of being head of a government of laws rather than men. He had a U.S. Treasury Department panel, the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), whack together an indecisive but fact-based report on the potential costs and benefits of the proposed takeover. Only at that point, with mere days remaining in his term of office, did Biden (or whoever was wielding his executive autopen) fully and officially block the Nippon Steel deal. Biden's successor had already been re-elected, and nobody could imagine that Donald Trump would be any less of an unruly economic nationalist — but the thing that is nearest and dearest to Trump's heart is deal-making, and Nippon Steel found a way to get the takeover done. The Japanese company had already promised to preserve U.S. Steel's Pittsburgh national head office and to honour existing collective-bargaining agreements with the unions. Trump extracted further concessions on investments and hiring, along with a means of enforcing them, namely a 'golden share' controlled by the U.S. government. Article content A 'golden share' is a special kind of equity that gives its holder veto power over specified corporate decisions. It is often used in privatizations to give governments some vestige of control over corporate entities originally created by the state (or, in Canada, the Crown) for public purposes. In this unusual case, the U.S. government is magically gaining a golden share in exchange for permitting the sale of one private company to another. The government will be given the right to choose some U.S. Steel board directors, to forbid any name change, and to veto factory closures, offshoring, acquisitions and other moves. Article content As the Cato Institute immediately pointed out, this is a de facto nationalization of U.S. Steel — the sort of thing that would have had Cold War conservatives climbing the walls and hooting about socialism. But at least socialism professes to be social! Yesterday a lefty energy reporter named Robinson Meyer was nosing around in the revised corporate charter for the newly-acquired U.S. Steel, and he discovered a remarkable detail that the Cato folks had missed: the decision powers of the golden share have been legally assigned to Donald Trump in person and by name for the duration of his presidency. Only after Trump has left the White House do those golden-share powers revert to actual U.S. government departments (Treasury and Commerce).
CBC
a day ago
- CBC
Prosecutors press Chau Lam on her mother's killing
Crown prosecutors spent the better part of two days this week pressing Chau Lam about the 2022 killing of her 88-year-old mother. Chau Lam, 59, and her sister Hue Lam, 62, each pleaded not guilty to first-degree murder in the October 2022 death of their mother, Kieu Lam. The jury trial began earlier this month in the Superior Court of Justice in Ottawa. Testifying in Vietnamese through a translator, Chau Lam began her testimony earlier this week by telling the court she loved her mother — and that she killed her. "I was scared my mother would hit my sister to death, she would hit me to death," she said. "Sometimes she just used a stick to hit us in the head. We had to protect ourselves." Since their arrest, the sisters have said they endured years of physical and emotional abuse at the hands of their mother. During Chau Lam's testimony, the court heard about her mother's history of medical issues, including a fractured hip and shoulder, and repeated visits to doctors and hospitals in the years leading up to her death. Chau Lam told the jury her mother never directly threatened to kill them, but said the violence had been escalating before the killing. Under cross-examination, Chau Lam could not point to any specific serious assaults or injuries inflicted by her mother. She also agreed there were no defensive wounds on her body when she was arrested. Prosecutors challenged the defence's argument the sisters were under their mother's control, noting that one held a job, they attended temple and both had taken English classes. The Crown has argued Kieu Lam gave life to her daughters, only to have hers taken. Prosecutors previously told the jury the woman was "sleeping defenceless" in bed when the sisters smashed her head with a hammer and strangled her. Chau Lam acknowledged that she was "angry" at the time of the killing — as she told police following her arrest. Difficult testimony The court recessed several times Thursday and Friday as Chau Lam became emotional under questioning. At one point, she broke down while describing how the abuse worsened after her sister was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease. "I'm a human being. I know what is right and what is wrong," she said. "It's not that my mom just scolded us a few times and then we would get upset and kill our mom," she added, saying if her mom had given them "a little bit of love" they would be content. As testimony continued, Chau at one point Thursday said she could no longer go on. "No matter how many times, you will not understand," she told the court. "I will now stop talking. The more I talk, the more it looks like I tried to blame my mom, so I [will] stop talking." Court was adjourned for the day. It resumed Friday with further cross-examination focused on the condition of the victim, who was 88 years old and used a walker. After 16 minutes of questioning, Chau again became emotional and another break was required. She told the jury: "The more people talk, people say that I try to blame my mom. My mom's already dead. If my mom was still alive, then I am not sitting here."
