The leader of the Kudo-kai yakuza group was served with an arrest warrant Monday on suspicion of violating two laws over the 2012 shooting of a former police officer.
Satoru Nomura, the 68-year-old head of the Kitakyushu-based criminal syndicate — one of the nation's biggest — was arrested for the fifth time. His previous arrests were in connection with attacks by the group on three people between 1998 and 2014, including one that involved a murder, and income tax evasion.
This time he is suspected of violating the 1999 law against organized crime and the control of criminal proceeds, as well as the firearms control law.
The police also rearrested 15 Kudo-kai members and arrested two other members.
All of those arrested are suspected of involvement in the attack on the former police officer, who was shot by a gunman in Kitakyushu in April 2012 while walking to a hospital where he worked after retiring from the force. He sustained serious injuries and the case is being treated as an attempted murder.
The former officer, 64, was in charge of investigating the Kudo-kai for more than 30 years until he retired in 2011.
On the same day as the shooting, prosecutors indicted Nomura for evading hundreds of millions of yen in income tax.
The Kudo-kai had some 870 members and quasi-members as of the end of 2014, mostly in Fukuoka Prefecture. Other members are located in Nagasaki, Yamaguchi, Tokyo and Chiba, according to the Fukuoka police.