Japan police chief to resign over Abe shooting death

TOKYO -- Japan's national police chief said Thursday he will resign to take responsibility over the fatal shooting of former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe at a campaign speech last month.

National Police Agency Chief Itaru Nakamura's announcement came as his agency released a report on how it failed to protect Abe's life on July 8 when he was assassinated in Nara in western Japan.

The police report found holes in Abe's police protection that allowed the attacker to shoot him from behind.

Nakamura said he took the former prime minister's death seriously and that he submitted his resignation to the National Public Safety Commission earlier Thursday.

“In order to fundamentally reexamine guarding and never to let this happen, we need to have a new system,” Nakamura told a news conference as he announced his intention to step down.

Nakamura did not say when his resignation would be official. Japanese media reported that his resignation is expected to be approved at Friday's Cabinet meeting.

The alleged gunman, Tetsuya Yamagami, was arrested at the scene and is currently under mental evaluation until late November. Yamagami told police that he targeted Abe because of the former leader's link to the Unification Church, which he hated.

Abe sent a video message last year to a group affiliated with the church, which experts say may have infuriated the shooting suspect.

Abe's family paid tribute to him in a private Buddhist ritual Thursday marking the 49th day of his assassination.

In Nara, prefectural police chief Tomoaki Onizuka also expressed his intention to step down over Abe's assassination.

The church, which was founded in South Korea in 1954 and came to Japan a decade later, has built close ties with a host of conservative lawmakers, many of them members of Abe’s Liberal Democratic Party on their shared interests of anti-communism.

Since the 1980s, the church has faced accusations of problematic recruiting and religious sales in Japan, and the governing party’s church ties have sent support ratings of Prime Minister Fumio Kishida’s Cabinet into a nosedive even after its recent shuffle.

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Rains in S. Korea turn Seoul's roads to rivers, leave 7 dead

SEOUL, South Korea -- Heavy rains drenched South Korea’s capital region, turning the streets of Seoul’s affluent Gangnam district into a river, leaving submerged vehicles and overwhelming public transport systems. At least seven people were killed and six others were missing.

Commuters slowly returned to work Tuesday morning after emergency crews worked overnight to clean up much of the mess. But there were concerns about further damage as torrential rain was forecast for the second day in a row.

While most of the Seoul metropolitan area’s subway services were back to normal operations, around 80 roads and dozens of riverside parking lots remained closed due to safety concerns.

President Yoon Suk Yeol called for public employers and private companies to adjust their commuting hours and urged aggressive action in restoring damaged facilities and evacuating people in danger areas to prevent further deaths. Moon Hong-sik, spokesperson of Seoul’s Defense Ministry, said the military was prepared to deploy troops to help with recovery efforts if requested by cities or regional governments.

The rain began Monday morning and intensified through the evening hours. Nearly 800 buildings in Seoul and nearby cities were damaged while more than 400 people were forced to evacuate from their homes, the Ministry of the Interior and Safety said.

People were seen wading through thigh-high waters Monday night in streets near the Gangnam subway station, one of Seoul’s most bustling business and leisure districts, where passenger cars, taxis and buses were stuck in mud-brown waters. Commuters evacuated as water cascaded down the stairs of the Isu subway station like a waterfall. In the nearby city of Seongnam, a rain-weakened hillside collapsed into a university soccer field.

Rescue workers failed to reach three people who called for help before drowning in a basement home in the Gwanak district of southern Seoul Monday night. Another woman drowned at her home in the nearby Dongjak district, where a public worker died while clearing up fallen trees, likely from electrocution. Choi Seon-yeong, an official from the Dongjak district ward office, said it wasn’t immediately clear whether the water was electrified because of a damaged power source or equipment the man was using.

Two people were found dead in the debris of a collapsed bus station and a landslide in the nearby city of Gwangju.

Four people went missing in southern Seoul’s Seocho district, which is also home to the private residence of Yoon, who, according to his office, spent hours on the phone receiving briefings and issuing instructions overnight as the rain flooded some of the streets near his high-rise apartment complex.

“The heavy rainfall is expected to continue for days … we need to maintain our sense of alert and respond with all-out effort,” Yoon said during a visit to the government’s emergency headquarters in Seoul on Tuesday. He directed officials’ attention to areas vulnerable to landslides or flooding and to reducing the dangers of roads and facilities already damaged.

The country’s weather agency maintained a heavy rain warning for the Seoul metropolitan area and nearby regions on Tuesday and said the precipitation may reach 5 to 10 centimeters an hour (2 to 4 inches) in some areas. It said around 10 to 35 centimeters (4 to 14 inches) of more rain was expected across the capital region through Thursday.

More than 43 centimeters (17 inches) of rain were measured in Seoul’s hardest-hit Dongjak district from Monday to noon Tuesday. The per-hour precipitation in that area exceeded 14 centimeters (5.5 inches) at one point Monday night, which was the highest hourly downpour measured in Seoul since 1942.

Rainstorms also pounded North Korea, where authorities issued heavy rain warnings for the southern and western parts of the country. The North’s official Rodong Sinmun newspaper described the rain as potentially “disastrous” and called for measures to protect farmland and prevent flooding on the Taedong river, which flows through the capital, Pyongyang.

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