By Geoffrey Smith

Investing.com -- Shinzo Abe, who led a lengthy and ultimately unsuccessful campaign to end decades of deflation in Japan, has died after being shot, the Associated Press confirmed on Friday.

Abe was shot from behind minutes after he started a campaign speech Friday in the western Japanese city of Nara. He was airlifted to a hospital for emergency treatment but was not breathing and his heart had stopped. He was pronounced dead later at the hospital.

Japanese broadcaster NHK reported that the suspect, who was arrested at the scene, was a former naval serviceman.

Abe was Japan's longest-serving Prime Minister since World War 2. His assassination is a shocking event in a country that has been largely free of political violence since 1945.

Abe had resigned in 2019 after a recurrence of ulcerative colitis but had returned to political life after treatment, hoping to revive a stalled initiative to revise Japan's essentially post-war constitution, which committed it to a largely pacifist role in international affairs. Abe had argued that the rise of Chinese military power and the pursuit of nuclear weapons by North Korea had left the country's constitutionally-defined defense strategy unfit for purpose.

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