Photo/Illutration Tetsuya Yamagami, the susupect in the slaying of former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe last July, is taken to the Nara-Nishi Police Station in Nara on Jan. 10 following a psychiatric evaluation. (Nobuhiro Shirai)

NARA--Prosecutors on Jan. 13 indicted Tetsuya Yamagami for the murder last July of former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, concluding after a lengthy psychiatric evaluation he was of sound mind at the time and is competent to bear criminal liability.

Yamagami, 42, was also indicted for violating the Firearm and Sword Possession Control Law because he was caught red-handed with a homemade gun, according to sources close to the Nara District Public Prosecutors Office. 

He will likely be tried by lay judges. 

Yamagami underwent psychiatric evaluations that lasted around five and a half months following his arrest, moments after Abe was shot from behind around 11:30 a.m. last July 8 while delivering an election campaign speech near Kintetsu Railway’s Yamato-Saidaiji Station in Nara city.

Yamagami, according to investigators, told police after his arrest he bore a grudge against the Unification Church, now formally called the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification, because of his mother’s sizable donations to the group when he was growing up, which left the family in dire poverty.

He said he had initially planned to target the current head of the church, but she had been unable to visit Japan due to the novel coronavirus pandemic, so he shot Abe because he suspected the veteran politician had deep ties to the church.

Additional indictments are pending.

Nara prefectural police intend to send additional documents to prosecutors over suspected breaches of the Firearm and Sword Possession Control Law, the Weapons Manufacturing Law and the Gunpowder Control Law, sources said.

These matters relate to handmade guns and gunpowder that police found during a search of Yamagami’s home in Nara.

The prefectural police will also send documents to prosecutors over a gunshot presumed to have been fired by Yamagami at a building in Nara that houses an affiliated organization of the Unification Church on the eve of the murder.

Revelations about ties between politicians and the Unification Church, along with massive donations that church members make to the body and the plight of “second-generation” followers, whose parents are devout church members, emerged like a tidal wave after Abe’s death.

That led to the enactment of a law for victims’ relief that bans inappropriate donation solicitations by religious and other groups.

The legislation passed the extraordinary Diet session at the end of last year and took effect Jan. 5.

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