Cannibal killer shows up at anti-war protest
"Murderers actually know more about the importance of life than any other people on Earth."
Um, yeahhhhhhhhhhh.
http://mdn.mainichi.co.jp/waiwai/face/0212/1205cannibal.html
Japan's most notorious killer is back on the streets
By Ryann Connell
December 5, 2002
It has been over 21 years since Issei Sagawa committed one of the most shocking and heinous crimes in modern history. He freely admits to having slaughtered a Dutch woman in Paris, sexually violated her corpse, then literally butchered her so he could eat some of her remains.
Sagawa returned to Japan and became something of a morbid celebrity during the late '80s before disappearing from the public eye. But now, according to Shukan Shincho (12/12), Sagawa has reappeared at, of all places, an anti-war demonstration in Tokyo that attracted some 25,000 protesters.
Before going any further, it's important to note that despite what he did to that poor young woman in Paris, Sagawa, for a variety of legal loopholes that space doesn't permit to be explained here, has never been charged for what he did. It makes the now 53-year-old cannibal's presence at protest arguing over the importance of human life all the more ironic.
"What brought me here was the September 11 terrorist attacks in the United States last year. Until then, I was totally apolitical. I didn't care about politics or economics. But I thought when (U.S. President George) Bush launched his revenge attack on Afghanistan that it was just like Pearl Harbor. What I mean to say is that he used the excuse of terrorism to launch a war. It was a war that was nothing short of atrocity," the bloodthirsty necrophiliac whose hardly averse to the atrocious tells Shukan Shincho, explaining his astounding conversion to pacifism.
Sagawa claims to have been influenced by an exhibition of photos of Afghan refugees.
"When I let loose the shot from a carbine rifle into that woman in Paris, I thought that life was something that could easily be taken. But having seen the refugees' photo exhibition, I've finally come to realize just how much people will fight for their lives," sick Sagawa tells Shukan Shincho. "I've made it the theme for the remainder of my years to study exactly what life is."
In the wake of his killing, Sagawa neither apologized, nor was he punished for what he did. Instead, the emergence in 1989 of pedophile killer and current Death Row inmate Tsutomu Miyazaki gave Sagawa the opportunity to enter the Japanese media as a commentator on killing.
"Murderers actually know more about the importance of life than any other people on Earth," Sagawa says. "At least based on my experience, I've got no other option than to believe that."
Sagawa claims he has tried to at least seek the forgiveness of his victim's family.
"I hand-wrote a letter in French that I had my father try and pass on to her parents, but they refused to accept it," he says, adding that it would be impossible for him to visit the Netherlands to express his contriteness. "On Nov. 5, my father died after a long battle with the effects of a stroke, my mother has disinherited me and my brother refuses to have anything to do with me. It's all I can do just to get enough for meals each day. And there's my diabetes, which I can hardly scrape up the money for treatment for."
Not surprisingly, there were considerable suspicions of Sagawa's motives for taking part in the peace demonstration.
"I have extreme doubts about how serious he was in taking part in the antiwar demonstration," one of the rally organizers tells Shukan Shincho. "He didn't listen to a word of the explanation about what we were protesting for. He just handed out pamphlets addressed to Prime Minister (Junichiro) Koizumi saying that he had been ostracized from society. Then he said he was going to the Diet Building, which was nowhere near the route the demonstration took. He was carrying a handwritten placard saying, 'People are all beautiful. People shouldn't kill people.'"
Shukan Shincho adds that Sagawa, perhaps because of the chill in the air on the cold December 1st morning of the rally, pulled out of the demonstration after accompanying it for little more than 100 meters. He sat down on a bench in Yoyogi Park and sneered at the homeless men nearby.
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