Tokyo, Aug 25 (TIWN) Itaru Nakamura, Japan's police chief, announced his resignation on Thursday, saying he wanted to take responsibility for inadequate protection to former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe who was assassinated in broad daylight last month.

National police agency chief Itaru Nakamura's announcement came as his agency released a report blaming flaws in police protection — from planning to guarding at the scene — that led to Abe’s assassination on July 8 in Nara in western Japan.
Nakamura said he took the former prime minister's death seriously and that he submitted his resignation to the National Public Safety Commission earlier on Thursday.
"In order to fundamentally reexamine guarding and never to let this happen, we need to have a new system," Nakamura told a news conference as he announced his intention to step down.

Nakamura did not say when his resignation would be official. Japanese media reported that his resignation is expected to be approved at Friday's Cabinet meeting.
The alleged gunman, Tetsuya Yamagami, was arrested at the scene and is currently under mental evaluation until late November. Yamagami told police that he targeted Abe because of the former leader's link to the Unification Church, which he hated.
Abe sent a video message last year to a group affiliated with the church, which experts say may have infuriated the shooting suspect.
In a 54-page investigative report released on Thursday, the national police agency concluded that the protection plan for Abe neglected potential danger coming from behind him and merely focused on risks during his movement from the site of his speech to his vehicle.
Inadequacies in the command system, communication among several key police officials, as well as their attention in areas behind Abe at the campaign site led to their lack of attention on the suspect's movement until it was too late.
None of the officers assigned to immediate protection of Abe caught the suspect until he was already 7 meters (yards) behind him where he took out his homemade double-barrel gun, which resembled a camera with a long lens, to blast his first shot that narrowly missed Abe. Up to that moment, none of the officers was aware of the suspect's presence, or recognized the blast as a gun shot, the report said.
In just over two seconds, the suspect was only 5.3 meters (yards) behind Abe to fatally fire the second shot.