Tetsuya Yamagami, 41, shot and killed former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in the city of Nara on Friday last week. Abe was Japan’s longest-serving prime minister, and was buried today in Tokyo. An entire country is now mourning the loss of a leading figure for decades. The motive for the murder must have been what Yamagami perceived as a bond between Abe and a religious sect. This was confirmed by the police late on Friday. Now the Japanese newspaper Yomiuri Shimbun writes that the sect in question is the Unity Church. According to the newspaper, Yamagami has admitted this in an interrogation, but the police have not yet confirmed the information. Would avenge mother Tetsuya Yamagami is an unemployed former Marine. He has told police he has been planning the attack for several months. Among other things, he has made the murder weapon himself. The homemade weapon used to kill Shinzo Abe. Photo: AP Yamagami’s mother was a longtime member of the Unity Church. This was confirmed by the church itself on Monday. The mother is said to have donated large parts of her own money to the sect, which also goes by the name Familieforbundet for world peace and unity. According to Japanese Kyodo News, Yamagami was angry with the Unity Church, as he believed they were exploiting his mother financially. Tomihiro Tanaka, leader of the Unity Church in Japan, holds a press conference about the murder of Shinzo Abe. Photo: KYODO / Reuters Believes Abe had ties to sect Yamagami should have believed that Shinzo Abe collaborated with the Unity Church, writes Kyodo News further. According to the leader of the Unity Church in Japan, Tomihiro Tanaka, Abe and the church had worked closely together in the past. Abe has never had any formal ties to the group. Tanaka also denied that the church had forced Yamagami’s mother to give them money. Sect known for mass weddings The Unity Church was founded by Korean Sun Myung Moon in Seoul in 1954, and has hundreds of thousands of members in both Japan and South Korea. Sun Myung Moon during a dinner in Washington DC in 1985. Photo: RON EDMONDS / AP The church is a neo-religious and anti-communist sect. The followers consider Moon a prophet. A few years before Moon passed away in 2012, he also founded an organization known as the Universal Peace Alliance. That organization often collaborates with the Unity Church, and organizes lectures in Oslo, among other places. The group is best known for large mass weddings where several hundred people get married at the same time.
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The motive was controversial sect – news Urix – Foreign news and documentaries
