Within hours of a 41-year-old suspect’s arrest in the fatal shooting of former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe with an improvised gun, police raided Tetsuya Yamagami’s home Friday and found a small arsenal of homemade weapons — so-called zip or pipe guns.
Moments after an assassin fired the deadly shots as Abe delivered a campaign speech, a video showed an unwieldy, more-than-foot-long weapon with two metal barrels and a wooden board featuring some kind of firing mechanism. A puff of smoke emanated from the gun after a loud bang as the shooter discharged its barrels.
“We are conducting forensics, but clearly it looks homemade,” the police chief of Nara, the city in western Japan where the assassination occurred, told reporters at a news conference.
