"A short distance behind him, a plume of smoke enveloped a thin, shaggy man wearing cargo pants, rectangular black glasses, and a face mask-it was July, 2022, and pandemic protocols were still in place. The man held a large oblong contraption. It consisted of two metal pipes, a wooden board wound in black electrical tape, a bundle of wires, and a plastic handle. It had the shape of a gun but looked homemade, like a high-school science project."
"Three hundred miles east, in Tokyo, a journalist named Eito Suzuki saw the news break on TV: Abe, the longest-serving Prime Minister in Japanese history, was dead. Suzuki was at home, about to leave for a hotel staycation with his wife and son. Everything about the story was shocking-the fact of the gun, the lapse in security, the surreal death of one of the most powerful men in the country."
Shinzo Abe was shot while speaking at a political rally near a Nara train station and collapsed with blood seeping from his neck. Gun ownership is essentially illegal in Japan and firearm deaths are very rare, making the attack shocking. A short distance away a man with a homemade, two-pipe contraption resembling a gun was tackled; he asked, "Did it hit him?" In Tokyo, journalist Eito Suzuki watched the news and, given his decades-long investigations into cults, immediately suspected a possible cult connection. Suzuki is known for probing the Unification Church, a Korean religious movement with significant influence in Japan.
Read at The New Yorker
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]