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Firefighters battle a fire at Kyoto Animation Studio on July 18, 2019 in Kyoto, Japan.
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A Japanese court on Thursday sentenced a 45-year-old man to death for setting fire to a famous Kyoto animation studio in 2019 that killed 36 people in the country. worst mass murder According to public broadcaster NHK, this is the first time in almost 20 years.
Shinji Aoba was charged with murder and arson after giving statements to police. The work was plagiarized And he claimed to have used gasoline to set the studio on fire. On Thursday, he was sentenced at Kyoto District Court.
Police said there were dozens of people inside the three-story building at the time of the fire, but the fire spread so quickly that many did not have time to escape. All of those killed were employees, and at least 32 people were injured.
In his ruling, Presiding Judge Keisuke Masuda described Aoba’s crime as “truly cruel and inhumane.” Masuda said the victims’ deaths were “too serious and tragic” and described how the studio was engulfed in flames and smoke.
The judge said, “The fear and pain of those who died in Studio 1, which instantly turned into hell, and the victims who died afterwards, is indescribable.”
At a 2019 press conference, police said Aoba had unspecified mental health issues.
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A man lays flowers and prays near the Kyoto Animation Studios building after an arson attack in Kyoto, Japan, on July 19, 2019.
At the trial that began in September last year, he pleaded not guilty, but his defense team argued that he was mentally ill and could not be held criminally responsible.
However, prosecutors argued that Aoba was fully competent and requested the death penalty.
Only in developed democracies, Japan And in some parts of the United States, the death penalty persists. Human rights groups, including Amnesty International, say international law prohibits the use of the death penalty against mentally ill people.
On Thursday, a judge ruled that Aoba was able to tell right from wrong at the time of the incident, NHK reported. Regarding his ability to take responsibility, NHK reported, “It was determined that he was not mentally insane or mentally deficient at the time of the crime.”
The fire was the worst mass murder incident in Japan since the 2001 arson attack on a building in Tokyo’s Kabukicho, which killed 44 people.The death toll also exceeded the infamous death toll Tokyo sarin incident Thirteen people died in a 1995 subway incident.
Fans around the world lost their lives in the Kyoto attack, and mourned the loss of a studio that put its employees first and was a major force in the industry.
Founded in 1981, Kyoto Animation (also known as KyoAni) has made a name for itself by producing high-quality animation depicting both the mystical and the mundane.
Some of its popular works include the anime series “Free!”, the manga series “K-ON!”, the TV anime “The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya”, and “Violet Evergarden”, which was picked up by Netflix in 2018.
This story has been updated.
