Japan Heads To Polls After Assassination

TOKYO (AP) — Japanese went to the polls Sunday in the shadow of the assassination of former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who was gunned down while making a campaign speech. Abe’s governing party appeared to be cruising to a major victory. As people voted, police in western Japan sent the alleged assassin to a local prosecutors’ office for further investigation. A day earlier a top regional police official acknowledged possible security lapses that allowed the attacker to get so close and fire a bullet at the still-influential former Japanese leader. In a country still recovering from the shock, sadness and fear of Abe’s shooting — the first former or serving leader to be assassinated in postwar Japan — polling started for half of the upper house, the less powerful of Japan’s two-chamber parliament. Abe was shot in Nara on Friday and airlifted to a hospital but died of blood loss. Police arrested a former member of Japan’s navy at the scene. Police confiscated a homemade gun and several others were later found at his apartment. The alleged attacker, Tetsuya Yamagami, told investigators he acted because of Abe’s rumored connection to an organization that he resented, police said, but had no problem with the former leader’s political view. The man had developed hatred toward a religious group that his mother was obsessed about and that bankrupted a family business, according to media reports, including some that identified the group as the Unification Church.