Monday, April 23, 2007

Gangster apologizes to nation, but not to family of murdered Nagasaki mayor

The gangster who allegedly shot former Nagasaki Mayor Itcho Ito to death last week made an apology on Monday, saying, "I caused trouble to the people of Nagasaki and the entire nation," his lawyer said. There was no apology to the late mayor's family, however, the lawyer said.

Tetsuya Shiroo, 59, said trouble with the city had triggered the murder, according to the lawyer, who met him earlier in the day for one hour at Nagasaki Police Station. Shiroo claims he shot Ito because no compensation was given for a car damaged by a pothole at a road-works site on a city road.

Shiroo also said a company connected to him could not secure a loan from the city, according to the lawyer. "I was financially struggling," he was quoted as saying.

The lawyer said Shiroo told him that on April 17 he arrived at the scene of the shooting, near the Japan Railways Nagasaki Station, "on foot, alone." "I did it without consulting with anyone else," he said, according to the lawyer.

It was reported that a suspicious car had been spotted near the shooting site around the time of the incident, raising the possibility that Shiroo had at least one accomplice.

"The car has nothing to do with the shooting," Shiroo said Monday, according to his lawyer.

Shiroo had until recently turned down interviews with his lawyer. He had done so because he was "not feeling well," according to the lawyer.

Ito, who was campaigning for a fourth four-year term as Nagasaki mayor, was shot twice in the back in front of his election campaign office, and died from loss of blood in a hospital early Wednesday.

Shiroo, a member of a gang affiliated with Japan's biggest organized crime syndicate, the Yamaguchi-gumi, was arrested on the spot on suspicion of attempted murder.

1 comments:

Anonymous said...

An unusually large number of invalid votes were recorded in Sunday's mayoral election in Nagasaki City and the city's election management committee said many voted for Itcho Ito, the former mayor seeking a reelection but gunned down during campaigning. A total of 15,435 votes were judged invalid. "The largest number of them carried the name of the former mayor," an official of the election committee said.

The committee noted that a large chunk, or 7,592 votes, of those who voted before the election day were for the slain mayor. He was widely seen as the front-runner in the election until he was gunned down on Tuesday and died the following day just ahead of Sunday's ballot date. Some invalid ballots also had entries such as "son of mayor" or "successor to mayor" or entries mixing up the first and last names of the two candidates who scored the highest among the five candidates in the election.