Japan hanged two men convicted of murder including...

Japan hanged two men convicted of murder including a former psychiatric patient who stabbed eight children to death in 2001 in the country's worst school massacre. Mamoru Takuma, 40, who went on a rampage with a butcher's knife at an elementary school in the city of Osaka, was executed at the Osaka Detention Center.
The justice ministry only said two prisoners on death row were executed and declined to confirm the news reports. Takuma had been sentenced to death in August 2003 for killing seven girls and a boy.
The death penalty became final in the following month when he decided not to appeal the sentence. At Takuma's sentencing, the judge called the killings "one of the most heinous cases in Japan's criminal history" and said there was no way that the killer would be rehabilitated.
Takuma was judged mentally fit to face punishment although he had been a psychiatric patient formerly diagnosed as suffering from schizophrenia.
His motive was a desire for revenge against his four ex-wives which had evolved into a grudge against society as a whole, Judge Masayuki Kawaai said. However, while on death row in December 2003, Takuma married a woman who had been sending him letters and gifts.
"I could have killed more if it had been at a kindergarten," Takuma said of the crime during his trial.
He has never apologised to bereaved families and victims, a gesture that carries great weight in determining sentences in Japan.
It was unprecedented for Japan to execute a death row inmate less than a year after his sentence was finalized.
A 59-year-old former yakuza gang boss, Sueo Shimazaki was also hanged for killing three gangsters in 1988.
Shimazaki ordered the killing of one mobster to obtain 100 million yen (917,000 dollars) in insurance and the other two because they knew about the crime.