A 30-year-old Japanese man was sentenced Tuesday by a Tokyo court to death for having murdered in 2017 nine people he had successively lured to his home after spotting them on Twitter.
“The death penalty has been pronounced,” a court official told AFP. The accused, Takahiro Shiraishi, admitted during his trial that he killed and dismembered nine people aged 15 to 26, including eight women.
His lawyers had pleaded for a prison sentence arguing that his victims – who had expressed suicidal thoughts on social media – had given him their consent to die. But this version of the facts, contested by the accused himself, was rejected by the court.
“None of the nine victims consented to be killed, even tacitly,” according to statements by the trial judge reported by the public broadcaster NHK. He also denounced facts “of extreme gravity” and stressed that the “dignity” of the victims had been “trampled”.
Mr. Shiraishi approached his prey on Twitter telling them that he could help them with their suicidal plans or even die alongside them.
He was also on trial for dismembering the bodies of his victims and storing them in coolers in his small apartment in Zama, in the great southwestern suburb of Tokyo.
On October 31, 2017, the police discovered a veritable house of horrors in his home: 240 pieces of human remains hidden in coolers and toolboxes, sprinkled with kitty litter in an attempt to mask the odors of putrefaction.
The last capital execution in Japan dates back a year, that of a Chinese convicted of the murders of four members of the same family in the southwest of the country in 2003.
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