Social Media Killer Who Dismembered Nine People Executed in Russia's Neighboring Country

The "Twitter killer" who killed nine people in Japan has reportedly been executed. According to media reports, the execution of Takahiro Shiraishi is believed to be the first case of capital punishment in the Land of the Rising Sun since 2022.

Japan has executed a man dubbed the “Twitter killer” for murdering and dismembering nine people he met online, marking the first execution in the Asian country since 2022, The Guardian reports.

Takahiro Shiraishi was sentenced to death for the murder and dismemberment of nine people he met on social media in 2017. He was hanged on Friday, The Guardian reported.

Shiraishi is alleged to have lured his victims, mostly women aged 15 to 26, to his apartment near Tokyo, where he killed them and dismembered their bodies.

According to media reports, he confessed to killing all nine people, as well as hiding the victims' body parts in refrigerators in his small apartment.

Justice Minister Keisuke Suzuki said Shiraishi's crimes included "robbery, rape, murder, destruction of a corpse and abandonment of a corpse."

"The nine victims were beaten and strangled, murdered, robbed and then mutilated, their body parts were hidden in boxes and parts were thrown into a garbage dump," Suzuki told reporters in Tokyo on Friday.

“After long and careful consideration, I have given the order for the execution,” the justice minister said.

Japan and the United States are the only two members of the Group of Seven industrialized nations to retain the death penalty, The Guardian reports. The practice enjoys overwhelming public support, with a 2024 Japanese government poll of 1,800 respondents finding that 83% believed the death penalty was “inevitable.”

As The Guardian notes, Tomohiro Kato was hanged in 2022 for a 2008 attack in which he drove a rented two-ton truck into a crowd in Tokyo's Akihabara district and then got out and went on a stabbing spree, killing seven people.

As of December 2023, 107 prisoners were awaiting execution on their death sentences, the Justice Ministry told AFP. The death penalty in Japan is carried out by hanging.

The law provides that the death penalty must be carried out within six months of the final verdict, after appeals have been exhausted.

In reality, however, most prisoners remain in solitary confinement for years, sometimes decades, with serious consequences for their mental health.

There has been widespread criticism of the system and the government's lack of transparency in its practices, The Guardian reports. Prisoners are often informed of their imminent death at the last minute, usually in the early hours of the morning before it happens.

The high-profile executions of Shoko Asahara and 12 former members of the doomsday cult Aum Shinrikyo* (a terrorist organization banned in Russia) took place in 2018. Aum Shinrikyo* organized the 1995 sarin gas bombings in the Tokyo subway, which killed 14 people and sickened thousands more.

*"Aum Shinrikyo" is a terrorist organization banned in Russia