The assassination of Shinzo Abe
Japan's longest-serving prime minister is shot with a homemade gun in a country almost without them.
- When
- Known to
- ± 12 hours
- Era
- Contemporary, Holocene
- Where
- Nara, Japan · 34.6851° N, 135.8048° E
Abe was killed on 8 July 2022 while campaigning in Nara, shot with a weapon the assailant had built himself — Japan records single-digit gun deaths in a typical year. The assassin's stated motive, his family's ruin by donations to the Unification Church, opened an investigation into the church's decades-long entanglement with the governing Liberal Democratic Party that brought down ministers and reshaped Japanese politics.