Photo/Illutration Tetsuya Yamagami at Nara-Nishi Police Station in Nara on July 10 (Asahi Shimbun file photo)

The man suspected of killing former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was struggling financially under mounting debts and the steep costs of manufacturing his arsenal of homemade guns, according to police sources.

Tetsuya Yamagami, 41, had quit his job at a company in Osaka Prefecture in early June after working there for about three weeks, police sources said.

Police learned that making guns from scratch was a costly endeavor for Yamagami, who was flat broke and could not hold down a steady job, and that he was several hundreds of thousands of yen in debt.

“I was out of money and thought I would die in July. I decided to attack Abe before that,” Yamagami told investigators, sources said.

Yamagami registered at a staffing agency in Osaka Prefecture in October 2020. According to the agency, he worked at a company’s warehouse in Kyoto Prefecture, operating forklifts to move products.

After working there for a year and a half or so, he told the staffing agency that he wanted to quit the job in April this year.

The company asked him not to leave, but Yamagami insisted he would quit, citing his “poor health condition.” He left the job on May 15.

Police said Yamagami registered at a different staffing agency in mid-May and started working at a company in Osaka Prefecture.

The job was moving goods by forklifts.

In early June, Yamagami told the company he wanted to quit the job sooner than his contract stipulated, citing personal circumstances.

He left the job after working there for about three weeks. He has been unemployed since.

According to police, Yamagami said he “moved from workplace to workplace as a temporary hire, working at factories and warehouses.”

He left the company in Osaka Prefecture about a month before the shooting of Abe.

When police investigated into Yamagami’s financial situation, they found that he had taken out consumer loans and borrowed from other sources.

Police are now checking with credit card companies and other service providers to see if Yamagami had piled up more debts.

Yamagami lived in his apartment for more than a decade, paying about 35,000 yen ($254) in rent a month. He owns a mini-vehicle and a small motorcycle.

He also rented a garage with shutters for about 15,000 yen per month from sometime around November 2021 and February this year.

He told investigators that he used the garage to dry homemade gunpowder.

Yamagami told investigators he started making guns and ammo in spring 2021 and tested the weapons many times.

Police said Yamagami learned about Abe’s visit to Nara the evening before the July 8 shooting through the party’s website.

The Liberal Democratic Party’s Nara prefectural chapter said Abe’s campaign visit to Nara was decided on the evening of July 7.

Yamagami has told investigators he learned Abe would give a stump speech in Nara when he was returning “from Okayama to Nara, (while) searching on my smartphone,” according to police sources.

Yamagami went to Okayama with the intention to attack Abe at the venue where he gave a campaign speech, but he refrained from attacking him there because of the tight security, according to police.

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