The security plan for a stump speech, to be delivered in April by Prime Minister Fumio Kishida at a Port of Wakayama, was formulated based on the erroneous assumption that the audience would consist of related parties only.
The man is being held in jail for throwing an explosive device toward Kishida.
The report also revealed that checks on outsiders' comings and goings were left to the event's organizer.
The police met with the Liberal Democratic Party's prefectural chapter, among others, three days before the event, and asked them to set up a reception desk to conduct visitor checks. The chapter refused this request, saying the audience would be limited to members of the fishing cooperative and their families. The police then formulated its security policy on the assumption that the audience would be limited to related parties.
On the day of the speech, fishery cooperative staffers were supposed to visually identify visitors at the entrance of the audience where the speech was to be given. Ryuji Kimura, who is currently being detained for examination of his mental competence to bear criminal responsibility, entered the area without being stopped and subsequently threw the explosive device toward Kishida from a distance of about 10 meters.
The security guards near the entrance were checking the audience's behavior in the belief that members of the Cooperative were checking who was entering the venue.
The Security Plan only resulted in the results of the advance meetings and did not include effective safety measures to prevent people with dangerous objects from approaching the prime minister, the report concluded. The NPA has adopted a system in which it examines security plans submitted by prefectural police departments after the killing of former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in July last year. However, it failed to detect the shortfalls in the plan of Wakayama police.
We re treating the matter very seriously given that the incident occurred less than a year after ex-Prime Minister Abe's death, said NPA spokesman Yasuhiro Tsuyuki.