Japan executes ‘Twitter killer’ who murdered 9 people

TOKYO – Japan has executed a man dubbed the “Twitter killer” who murdered and dismembered nine people he met online, in the nation’s first enactment of the death penalty since 2022.

Takahiro Shiraishi, 34, was on June 27

hanged for killing his young victims

, all but one of whom were women, after contacting them on the social media platform now called X.

He targeted users who posted about taking their own lives, telling them he could help them in their plans, or even die alongside them.

Japan’s Justice Minister Keisuke Suzuki said Shiraishi’s crimes, carried out in 2017, included “robbery, rape, murder... destruction of a corpse and abandonment of a corpse”.

“Nine victims were beaten and strangled, killed, robbed and then mutilated with parts of their bodies concealed in boxes, and parts discarded in a garbage dump,” he told reporters in Tokyo on June 27.

Shiraishi acted “for the genuinely selfish reason of satisfying his own sexual and financial desires” and the murders “caused great shock and anxiety to society”. “After much careful consideration, I ordered the execution,” he added.

Japan and the United States are the only two Group of Seven countries to still use capital punishment, and there is overwhelming support for the practice among the Japanese public.

Shiraishi was sentenced to death in 2020 for the murders of his nine victims, aged between 15 and 26, after luring them to his small home near Tokyo. He stashed parts of their bodies around the apartment in coolers and toolboxes sprinkled with cat litter in a bid to hide the evidence.

His lawyers said he should receive a prison sentence because his victims had expressed suicidal thoughts and so had consented to die. But a judge dismissed that argument, calling the crimes “cunning and cruel”, according to reports at the time.

“The dignity of the victims was trampled upon,” the judge said, adding that Shiraishi preyed upon people who were “mentally fragile”.

The grisly murders were discovered in the autumn of 2017 by police investigating the disappearance of a 23-year-old woman who reportedly tweeted about wanting to kill herself.

Her brother gained access to her Twitter account and eventually led police to Shiraishi’s residence, where investigators found the nine dismembered bodies.

Death row prisoners

Executions are always done by hanging in Japan, where around 100 death row prisoners are waiting for their sentences to be carried out.

Nearly half are seeking a retrial, Mr Suzuki said on June 27.

Japanese law stipulates that executions must be carried out within six months of a verdict after appeals are exhausted.

In reality, however, most inmates are kept in solitary confinement for years, and sometimes decades. There is widespread criticism of the system and the government’s lack of transparency over the practice.

In 2022, Tomohiro Kato was hanged for an attack in 2008 in which he rammed a rented two-tonne truck into a crowd in Tokyo’s Akihabara district, before getting out and going on a stabbing spree in an attack that killed seven people. “I came to Akihabara to kill people. It didn’t matter who I’d kill,” he told police at the time.

The high-profile executions of guru Shoko Asahara and 12 former members of the Aum Shinrikyo doomsday cult took place in 2018.

Aum Shinrikyo orchestrated the 1995 sarin gas attacks on Tokyo’s subway system, killing 14 people and making thousands more ill. AFP