A man dubbed as Japan’s “Twitter killer” has been sentenced to death by the Tokyo District Court on Tuesday, for the serial murders of nine people in 2017, who the killer targeted after they made suicidal social media posts.
Takahiro Shiraishi, 30, was known to solicit suicidal persons to his house via his Twitter profile (whose name translated to ‘hangman’), and then murder and dismember them. Sometimes, he would also rape his victims. He stored the bodies of his victims in his apartment in Zama in Kanagawa Prefecture.
Shiraishi pleaded guilty and said he would not appeal his sentence.
He was arrested in 2017 after police found the bodies of eight women and one man in cold-storage cases in his apartment.
His defence lawyers argued that he was assisting the suicidal wishes of his victims, and therefore guilty of homicide with consent. The prosecuters in turn said that the victims clearly did not consent as they resisted when Shiraishi at temped to strangle them, in response to which, the defence said this was due to their “conditional reflexes. Presiding Judge Naokuni Yano ruled that the nine victims did not consent to be killed and that Shiraishi was mentally fit to be held responsible for the murders, Japan Times reported.
As per the indictment, he strangled and dismembered eight women and one man, the boyfriend of a victim, and among his victims was a teenager. He was also accused of sexually assaulting all of his female victims.
While violent crimes are relatively rare in Japan, suicide rates are high. In addition, 99 per cent cases tried in Japan end in convictions. In October alone, more people died from suicide (2,200) in Japan than did of COVID-19 (2,585) in all of 2020, CNN reported.
