A Japanese court sentenced a man to death after finding him guilty of murder and other crimes Thursday for carrying out a shocking arson attack on an anime studio in Kyoto, Japan, that killed 36 people.
The Kyoto District Court said it had declared that the defendant, Shinji Aoba, was mentally compatible to be punished for the crimes and announced his death sentence after a two-part postponement of the hearing on Thursday.
Aoba stormed into Kyoto Animation’s No. 1 studio on July 18, 2019, and set it on fire. Many of the victims were believed to have died of carbon monoxide poisoning. More than 30 other people were badly burned or injured.
Authorities said Aoba, who shouted “You’re dying!” At the time of the attack, he was neither current nor former employee of Kyoto Animation Company, a famous maker of hit television series.
Judge Keisuke Masuda said Aoba had searched for a novelist but had failed to find one and so sought revenge, believing that Kyoto Animation had stolen the novels he had submitted in a business competition, according to national broadcaster NHK.
NHK also reported that Aoba, who was unemployed and suffering financially after changing jobs several times, had planned some other attack at an exercise station north of Tokyo a month before the arson attack on the animation studio.
Aoba planned the attacks after reading previous cases of offenders involving arson, the court said in the ruling, noting that the procedure showed that Aoba had premeditated the crime and that he was mentally competent.
“The attack, which immediately turned the studio into hell and claimed the lives of 36 people, caused them indescribable pain,” the sentence reads, according to NHK.
Aoba, 45, was severely burned and was hospitalized for 10 months before his arrest in May 2020. He appeared in court in a wheelchair.
Aoba’s defense attorneys argued that he was not mentally worthy of being held criminally responsible.
About 70 people were working inside the studio in southern Kyoto, Japan’s ancient capital, at the time of the attack. One of the survivors said he saw a black cloud rising from downstairs, then scorching heat came and he jumped from a window of the three-story building gasping for air.
An expert interviewed through CBS News’ partner network, TBS TV, said at the time that the compactness of the roughly 7,500-square-foot design and the fact that there was only one exit made it vulnerable to an attack on the front of the building. The writer went to great lengths to plan the crime and unload gasoline, the sale of which is strictly controlled in Japan; Not sold in containers.
The company, founded in 1981 and better known as KyoAni, made a successful animated series about the school’s top female students, and the studio trained aspiring students.
Japanese media portrayed Aoba as a troublemaker who replaced contract jobs and apartments and argued with his neighbors.
The fire was Japan’s deadliest since 2001, when a blaze in Tokyo’s congested Kabukicho entertainment district killed 44 people, and it was the country’s worst known case of arson in modern times.