Many questions around killing of former Japanese PM Shinzo Abe

SINGAPORE - Unlike the attack on his grandfather, prime minister Nobusuke Kishi, who survived an assassination bid in 1960 that stemmed from the Liberal Democratic Party's internal feuds, Friday's (July 8) killing of Mr Shinzo Abe, 67, will be examined closely to see if this was the work of a gunman acting alone, or if it was part of more calculated warnings.

More will be known after the interrogation of the suspect now in custody, said to be a 41-year-old former member of the Maritime Self-Defence Force. He might well turn out to be just another mentally unstable person - like John Hinckley Jr, who shot at the late president Ronald Reagan in 1981, an unsuccessful assassination attempt; or Mark Chapman, who killed John Lennon outside his New York apartment a year earlier.