A Japanese man has been given a death sentence after an arson attack on an animation studio that killed 36 people in 2019.

Shinji Aoba was found guilty of murder and other crimes – with a court dismissing his lawyers’ claims that he was mentally unfit to be held criminally responsible.

Japan carries out executions by hanging.

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The fire was the country’s deadliest since 2001, when a blaze in Tokyo’s congested Kabukicho entertainment district killed 44 people.

Aoba burst into Kyoto Animation in July 2019 and was said to have shouted “die!” as he poured petrol around the studio.

More than 70 people were in the three-storey building at the time, with many fleeing the premises when the alarm was raised.

Many of the victims were young artists who are believed to have died of carbon monoxide poisoning.

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More than 30 other people were badly burned or injured.

Judge Keisuke Masuda said the 45-year-old’s attack was based on revenge as he believed the studio had plagiarised novels he had submitted as part of a company contest – an allegation Kyoto Animation denies.

It was reported Aoba, who was unemployed and in financial difficulty, had plotted a separate attack on a train station north of Tokyo a month before targeting the anime studio.

The arsonist suffered severed burns himself and spent 10 months recovering in hospital before his arrest in May 2020.

He was not expected to survive as so much of his body was burned, but medics deemed the wounds non-life-threatening and he underwent skin graft surgery in Osaka.

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‘Indescribable pain’

The judge said the attack “turned the studio into hell and took the precious lives of 36 people, [causing] them indescribable pain”, according to Japanese public broadcaster NHK.

After the incident, Japan’s late prime minister Shinzo Abe described the fire as “too appalling for words”.

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Kyoto Animation, known as KyoAni, was founded in 1981 as an animation and comic book production studio.

It is known for stories featuring high school girls including Lucky Star, K-On! and Haruhi Suzumiya, and doesn’t have a major presence outside Japan.

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