All about Japan's 'Twitter killer,' executed for murdering 9 people he met online

In the country's first execution since 2022, Japan has hanged a man - known as 'Twitter Killer' - for murdering nine people he met on social media. The man named Takahiro Shiraishi was sentenced to death for killing and dismantling the bodies of nine people he met on the social media platform X in 2017. Shiraishi mostly targeted females online from the age of 15 to 26. He used to lure these women to his apartment near Tokyo and then kill and cut up their bodies.

In the most chilling information in the case, the man used to contact suicidal people, especially women, and used to offer them help in dying. He used to say he would help these people die easily. After killing them. the man used to stash their bodies in a cooler. Japan's Justice Minister Keisuke Suzuki said Shiraishi’s crimes included “robbery, rape, murder ... destruction of a corpse and abandonment of a corpse”.

“Nine victims were beaten and strangled, killed, robbed, and then mutilated with parts of their bodies concealed in boxes, and parts discarded in a garbage dump,” Suzuki told reporters in Tokyo on Friday (June 27). “After much careful consideration, I ordered the execution,” he added.

This was Japan's first execution since 2022, when a man named Tomohiro Kato was hanged for an attack in 2008. He rammed a rented two-tonne truck into a crowd in Tokyo’s Akihabara district, before getting out and going on a stabbing spree, in an attack that killed seven people.

As of December 2023, around 107 prisoners are lined up for an execution in Japan, always done by hanging, the Japanese justice minister told AFP. As per the laws of the country, it is mandatory to execute within six months of the final verdict. But in reality, most inmates are left on tenterhooks in solitary confinement for years – and sometimes decades – causing severe consequences for their mental health.