The mother of Tetsuya Yamagami, the suspect in the shooting death of former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, likely donated a total of ¥100 million to the religious group commonly known as the Unification Church, according to investigative sources.
“I resented the group because my mother went bankrupt,” Yamagami, 41, was quoted as telling the Nara prefectural police after his arrest Friday, the day Abe was shot while giving a stump speech in Nara City. “I had tried to attack the religious group’s leadership with Molotov cocktails.”
The religious group was founded in South Korea in 1954 by the Rev. Sun Myung Moon as the Holy Spirit Association for the Unification of World Christianity. Moon and his wife, Hak Ja Han Moon, served as the leaders. The reverend died in 2012.
The group is now called the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification, the name the Japan branch has used since 2015. The Japan branch told The Yomiuri Shimbun that it was not appropriate for the group to announce how much Yamagami’s mother donated.
According to the sources, Yamagami’s mother joined the religious group around 1998 and in June 1999 she sold the land she inherited from her grandfather and the house in Nara where she lived with her three children. She was declared bankrupt in 2002.