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Videos of the shooting circulating online show the gunman approaching Abe from behind before firing two shots, both producing extremely loud cannon-like booms and plumes of white smoke.
Police later said they found multiple homemade guns and explosives when they searched Yamagami’s house, adding that he had allegedly admitted to shooting Abe with a DIY firearm.
From images of the gun, captured by bystanders including a reporter for Japan’s public broadcaster NHK, experts immediately suspected it was homemade. “The box-like device is wrapped in black tape and smoke can be seen coming from the muzzle. It’s certainly no standard shotgun,” a former detective for the Metropolitan Police Department firearms control division told The Daily Beast after reviewing photos.
While stressing it’s too early to be definitive about the precise design of the weapon used to murder Abe, another authority said the gun appeared to have some highly unusual features.
“I think the first interesting observation is that it’s clearly electrically fired,” said N. R. Jenzen-Jones, an arms and munitions intelligence specialist and Director of the U.K.-based Armament Research Services (ARES). “There’s electrical wire passing through each of those end caps that you can see in one of the images. Electrically operated firearms eliminate the need for a trigger mechanism that have complicated springs and levers but instead use solenoids. That indicates to me that it’s an electrically-fired firearm.” it’s probably a muzzle-loading design,” Jenzen-Jones added. “It’s probably a smooth-bore weapon—by which I mean unrifled, like a shotgun