Shinzo Abe's party sweeps to election victory in Japan days after his assassination: NHK - CNN

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Tokyo (CNN)Japan's ruling coalition swept to victory on Sunday in an upper house election that took on heightened significance following the assassination of former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.

Abe, 67, was shot on Friday in the city of Nara while delivering a speech in support of candidates from his Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) in a killing that has stunned a nation with one of the world's lowest rates of gun crime.

The country's leaders had urged the public to turn out and vote on Sunday, denouncing the killing as an attack on democracy.

Voters receive their ballots during Japan's upper house elections at a polling station in Tokyo on July 10.

"We must absolutely defend free and fair elections, which are the basis of democracy," Prime Minister Fumio Kishida said on Friday, adding that the party would "proceed with our election campaign as planned with the firm conviction that we will never yield to violence."

On Sunday, days ahead of Abe's wake and funeral, the conservative LDP won at least 63 seats, more than half of the 125 seats up for grabs, according to the country's public broadcaster NHK.

Vote counting is now complete, but official results have not yet been released by Japan's Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications.

While the upper house is the less powerful of the Japanese parliament's two chambers, the victory solidifies Kishida's political base, and could help him push ahead with key policy issues including possibly revising Japan's pacifist constitution -- a cause Abe had championed during his nearly nine years in power and one that would require a two-thirds majority vote of both houses of parliament, followed by a popular referendum.

A few hours after polls closed on Sunday, Kishida told NHK, "The election has been at stake because of violence but we have to complete it. Now we've completed it, it's quite meaningful -- moving forward, we have to continue to work hard to protect democracy."

The suspect behind the assassination

The election results come as the investigation continues into the suspect behind Abe's killing, 41-year-old Tetsuya Yamagami who was arrested at the site moments after the shooting.

Police say he is suspected of murder but has not been formally charged.

Yamagami said he held a grudge against a certain group, to which he believed Abe had ties, and which his mother had been involved with, according to Japan's public broadcaster NHK and Kyodo News Agency, citing police.

Nara police said on Monday that Yamagami may have carried out a test shooting in the early hours of Thursday morning against the building of "a certain group" in Nara prefecture, using the homemade gun he later killed Abe with.

Investigators said a vehicle believed to be Yamagami's car was seen on security cameras close to where Thursday's test shooting reportedly took place. Police refused to name the group, and the security footage has not been made public.

CNN has not been able to independently confirm what group the suspect was referring to.

The suspect's mother was a member of the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification, widely known as the Unification Church, said Tomihiro Tanaka, the church's Japan office chairman, in a statement on Monday.

The suspect was never a member of the church, while his mother has been a member who attended church events about once a month, the statement said. Tanaka added that the organization will cooperate with investigators if asked to do so.

Yamagami told police he watched YouTube videos to help him make his weapons, NHK reported Monday, citing investigators. He practiced shooting the weapons in the mountains days before the killing, and police found wooden boards with bullet holes in the suspect's vehicle, according to NHK.

Photos from the scene on Friday show what appeared to be a weapon with two cylindrical metal barrels wrapped in black tape.