Takahiro Shiraishi covers his face while sitting in a police car in Tokyo, Japan, on November 1, 2017. Japan executed Shiraishi on Friday. File Photo by EPA-EFE/JIJI PRESS
Japan executed a 34-year-old death row inmate known as the “Twitter Killer,” who was convicted of killing nine people at his apartment south of Tokyo in 2017, marking the first person to be put to death in the country in nearly three years.
Takahiro Shiraishi was executed at the Tokyo Detention House, Japanese broadcaster NHK reported.
The method of execution was hanging.
“I ordered the execution after careful and deliberate consideration,” Justice Minister Keisuke Suzuki told reporters during a press conference following the execution, the Kyodo News agency reported.
Shiraishi was sentenced to death in December 2020. He was convicted of luring his victims to his apartment, where he killed nine people, eight females and one male.
He was arrested in October 2017 after several dismembered bodies were found in his apartment by police investigating the disappearance of a local woman.
Authorities said Shiraishi and his victim met after she expressed suicidal thoughts online.
He told investigators that he targeted those who expressed suicidal ideation on social media, including Twitter, earning him the moniker “Twitter Killer.”
He would lure them to his apartment under the pretense that they would die together in a pact, but instead, he killed them and dismembered their bodies.
Nine heads and hundreds of bones were discovered by police during a search of his apartment.
Shiraishi is the first person to be executed in the Asian nation since July 2022, when Tomohiro Kato had his sentence carried out for killing seven people during a Tokyo stabbing spree in 2008.
Amnesty International Japan protested Shiraishi’s execution on Thursday, pointing to October’s acquittal of Iwao Hakamad — who had been sentenced to death in 1980 — which highlighted “the deep flaws in the death penalty system” an sparked renewed debate in the country about the controversial practice.
It also referenced U.N. special rapporteurs who called on the Japanese government in November to consider declaring a moratorium on executions as issues with its current system of carrying out capital punishment violates international law, including the practice of notifying death row only on the morning they are to be executed.
“That Japan proceeded with this execution amid such intense domestic and international scrutiny suggests that the government has not recognized the death sentence imposed on Mr. Hakamada — who was driven to mental collapse by decades on death row for a crime he did not commit — as a grave institutional and systemic failure,” Amnesty International Japan said in a statement.
Of the Group of Seven nations, only the United States and Japan have the death penalty. So far this year, the United States has executed 25 death row inmates.
