A Chinese citizen involved in the murder of a Japanese family in 2003 was executed on Thursday morning in Japan, Justice Minister Masako Mori told reporters.

“For a self-serving purpose, the convict killed all the family members… This is an extremely ruthless crime,” Japan Times reported quoting the minister.

A Chinese citizen named Wei Wei, together with two other Chinese students, committed a robbery and murder of a family of four in Fukuoka on the Japanese island of Kyushu in 2003. Wei Wei was arrested by the Japanese police, while accomplices managed to escape back to China, where they were also arrested. One of them was executed, and the other was sentenced to life imprisonment.

The death sentence of a former Chinese student was passed in 2011.

The last time a death sentence was applied in Japan in August of this year against two prisoners. Now over one hundred people are awaiting the death penalty in Japan. A convicted person can wait for execution for years, but he finds out about it only in the morning on the day the sentence is carried out. The Japanese respond to criticism from abroad that, unlike other countries in Japan, they do not shoot criminals at the crime scene.