Japan executes three for multiple murders

OKYO (AFP) – Japan on Tuesday hanged three inmates convicted of multiple murders including a Chinese national and a middle-aged man who found his victims through an Internet suicide site, the justice minister said.

The government identified the condemned as Hiroshi Maeue, 40, Yukio Yamaji, 25, and Chinese national Chen Detong, 41, who had killed three of his compatriots and wounded three more Chinese people.

All three men had committed "grave and cruel" crimes and "taken precious lives with very selfish motives," Justice Minister Eisuke Mori said after the sentences were carried out in Tokyo and the western city of Osaka.

Maeue, executed in Osaka, killed three people including a 14-year-old in 2005 after he got to know them separately through an Internet website where people contemplating ending their lives meet to make suicide pacts.

Maeue arranged to meet his victims under the pretense they would jointly commit suicide through carbon monoxide poisoning. He then lured them into a van in a parking lot, tied their hands and feet and choked them to death.

He confessed to deriving sexual pleasure from watching people suffocate.

Yamaji, also executed in Osaka, raped and then stabbed to death two sisters, stole their money and set fire to their apartment in 2005.

Chen, the Chinese national, was executed in Tokyo for killing three of his compatriots and injuring three more in Kawasaki, southwest of Tokyo, in 1999.

Japan, which executed four convicted murderers in January, is the only major industrial nation other than the United States to impose the death penalty.

Capital punishment is overwhelmingly supported by the public in Japan, which has one of the world's lowest crime rates.

But Japan has regularly come under fire from the European Union and campaigners over its use of the death penalty, especially its practice of hanging inmates without any prior warning for them or their families.

Makoto Teranaka, of Amnesty International's Japanese chapter, said after the latest executions Tuesday that "this is a grave act that cannot be permitted amid international calls to suspend capital punishment".

Despite the criticism, conservative governments have stepped up the pace of executions. Last year Japan hanged 15 death-row inmates, the highest number since 1975, when the country executed 17 people.

The latest executions came as the ruling Liberal Democratic Party faces August 30 elections. The opposition has said it would "encourage national debate over capital punishment" if it takes power.

Source: AP, July 28, 2009