Japan has executed a man who was found guilty of killing and dismembering nine people he made contact with on social media, the first use of capital punishment in the country in nearly three years.
Takahiro Shiraishi was hanged on Friday after he was sentenced to death for the 2017 murders of eight women and one man in his apartment in Zama city in Kanagawa near Tokyo.
He was dubbed the “Twitter killer” as he had contacted his victims via the social media platform, now known as X.
Shiraishi admitted to committing the murders after reaching out and offering to help people – who were contemplating suicide – to die. He had stashed bits of the bodies of his nine victims in coolers around his small apartment, according to media reports.
Justice Minister Keisuke Suzuki, who authorised Shiraishi’s hanging, said he made the decision after careful examination of the case, taking into account the convict’s “extremely selfish” motive for crimes that “caused great shock and unrest to society”.
The execution on Friday was the first in Japan since July 2022 of a man sentenced to death for a stabbing rampage in Tokyo’s Akihabara shopping district in 2008.
It was also the first time the death penalty was carried out since Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba’s government was inaugurated last October.
Last September, a Japanese court acquitted Iwao Hakamada, who had spent the world’s longest time on death row. The court found he was wrongfully convicted of crimes committed nearly 60 years ago.
One of the highest-profile executions in Japan was carried out in 2018 of the guru Shoko Asahara and 12 former members of the Aum Shinrikyo doomsday cult, which orchestrated the 1995 sarin gas attacks on Tokyo’s subway system that killed 14 people and made thousands ill.
Capital punishment is carried out by hanging in Japan, and prisoners are notified of their execution just hours before it is carried out, which has long been decried by human rights groups for the stress it puts on death-row prisoners.
Japan and the United States are the only two members of the Group of Seven industrialised economies to retain the death penalty.
There is strong public support for the practice in Japan. A government survey in 2024 of 1,800 respondents found that 83 percent viewed the death penalty as “unavoidable”.
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