Japan | He poisoned all the employees of a bank, took a miserable loot and spent 39 years awaiting execution
On January 26, 1948, with US troops occupying Japanese territory after the defeat of the Great Empire of Japan in World War II, the artist Sadamichi Hirasawa, 55-year-old, wearing a bracelet from the Department of Social Welfare, entered the Teigin Bank in Shiinamachi, a suburb of Toshima, in the city of Tokyo, shortly before it closed to the public. He presented himself as a medical epidemiologist showing the corresponding credential. Hirasawa explained that he had been sent by the US occupation authorities and that he had orders to treat bank staff against a sudden outbreak of dysentery, an intestinal inflammation that can be fatal without proper care. He gave the people present a pill and a few drops of a liquid that he carried in his briefcase. There were sixteen employees at the time and he asked that they prepare as many cups of tea to digest the medicine against dysentery. Naturally, he had to make the preparations for each patient. The sixteen bank employees obediently lined up...