The Diplomat
The President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, went yesterday to the Embassy of Japan in Madrid to convey his condolences for the assassination of former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.
“With deep regret, I would like to convey our condolences for the assassination of former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, on behalf of the Government of Spain and Spanish society as a whole,” reads Sanchez’s message, reproduced through Moncloa’s Twitter account. The Prime Minister wrote his note in front of the Japanese ambassador in Madrid, Kenji Hiramatsu.
“I will always remember the prime minister’s visit to Spain in 2018, an occasion to further strengthen relations between Spain and Japan,” he added, referring to the visit made by Abe to Madrid on October 16, 2018 to attend a Bilateral Summit, where he signed with Pedro Sánchez a joint declaration that elevated the framework of the bilateral relationship to “strategic partnership.”
Shinzo Abe, 67, died last Friday after being shot while delivering a speech at an election rally in the western Japanese city of Nara. The only suspect in the attack is a 41-year-old former military man named Tetsuya Yamagami, who confessed after his arrest that he had shot Abe because of the former prime minister’s ties to the Unification Church. The mother of the alleged criminal had given such a large amount of donations to this religious group that she ended up going bankrupt.
Abe, who led the country for almost eight years -a record in post-war Japan-, visited Spain twice, on May 4, 2014, when he was received by the then Prime Minister, Mariano Rajoy (who acted as his cicerone in Santiago de Compostela), and on October 16, 2018, to attend a Bilateral Summit in Madrid. Apart from that, Sánchez held a bilateral meeting with Abe at the end of June 2019, in the margins of the G20 Summit in Osaka (Japan) and, in August 2020, he expressed his wish for a speedy recovery to Shinzo Abe, who had just announced his resignation due to health problems.
