Nineteen people were killed and 25 wounded after an attack by a knife-wielding man at a facility for the disabled in central Japan early on Tuesday, a government official said, in Japan's worst mass killing in decades.
Police have arrested Satoshi Uematsu, a 26-year-old former employee at the facility in Sagamihara, Kanagawa Prefecture, about 25 miles (40 km) southwest of Tokyo, a Kanagawa prefecture official said. Uematsu had turned himself in, the official told a news conference carried on public broadcaster NHK.
While all 19 had not yet been officially declared dead, they were all "in a state of cardiac arrest", the official said. Another 25 people were wounded, 20 of them seriously, he said.
Japanese officials often describe people as being in cardiac arrest before they are officially declared as dead.
The Kyodo news agency says the dead ranged in age from 18 to 70 and included nine males and 10 females. Earlier media reports had said as many as 45 people had been wounded.
Staff called police at 2.30 a.m. local time (01:30 p.m. EDT Monday) with reports of a man armed with a knife on the grounds of the Tsukui Yamayuri-En facility, media reported. The man wore a black T-shirt and trousers, reports said.
The 3-hectare (7.6 acre) facility, established by the local government and nestled on the wooded bank of the Sagami River, cares for people with a wide range of disabilities, NHK said, quoting an unidentified employee.
Another woman who said she used to work at the facility said many patients were profoundly disabled.
"They are truly innocent people. What did they do? This is shocking," she told Japanese television station TBS.
BAG OF KNIVES
Police had recovered a bag with several knives, at least one stained with blood, the Kanagawa prefecture official said.
Police said they were still investigating possible motives.
Asahi Shimbun reported that the suspect was quoted by police as saying: "I want to get rid of the disabled from this world." Other reports said he had held a grudge after being fired from his job at the facility.
Twenty-nine emergency squads responded to the attack, Kyodo reported, with those wounded taken to at least six hospitals in the western Tokyo area.
A man identified as the father of a patient in the facility told NHK he learned about the attack on the radio and had received no information from the center.
"I'm very worried but they won't let me in," he said, standing just outside a cordon of yellow crime-scene tape.
The man, who arrived at the scene around 5 a.m. (04:00 p.m. EDT Monday), said he had never heard of trouble at the facility before.
NHK reported that the facility is usually locked at night but the man broke into the building by smashing a window.
The facility's website said the center had a maximum capacity of 160 people, including staff.
The U.S. Army's Camp Zama base is near Sagamihara in the adjacent town of Zama.
Social media went into overdrive as news of the mass stabbing broke. "I can't stop shaking. What a terrible incident, it's just too much," one post on Twitter said.
Such mass killings are extremely rare in Japan and typically involve stabbings, due to Japan's strict gun laws.
Eight children were stabbed to death at their school in Osaka by a former janitor in 2001. Seven people died in 2008 when a man drove a truck into a crowd and began stabbing people in Tokyo's popular electronics and "anime" district of Akihabara.
A revision to Japan's Swords and Firearms Control Law was introduced in 2009 in the wake of that attack, banning the possession of double-edged knives and further tightening gun-ownership rules.
Members of a doomsday cult killed 12 and made thousands ill in 1995 in simultaneous attacks with sarin nerve gas on five Tokyo rush-hour subway trains.
(Additional reporting by William Mallard and Kaori Kaneko in Tokyo, Eric Beech in Washington and and Jon Herskovitz in Austin; Writing by Lincoln Feast; Editing by Sandra Maler, Grant McCool and Paul Tait)
There are always people who will find ways to kill others; I don't want to hear any more about guns. Knives can be just as fatal. And 19 plus 25 injured!!!! All by one guy... I wonder where the employees were....
This is huge news over here and has knocked everything else off the news channels.
I had to edit to "clean up" the bottom of the article by deleting some nonrelevant pictures, etc....
Yep. If a person wants to kill, they will find a way.
Those poor victims.
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A flock of flirting flamingos is pure, passionate, pink pandemonium-a frenetic flamingle-mangle-a discordant discotheque of delirious dancing, flamboyant feathers, and flamingo lingo.
In February, Uematsu tried to hand deliver a letter to Parliament's lower house speaker that revealed his dark turmoil. It demanded that all disabled people be put to death through "a world that allows for mercy killing," Kyodo news agency and TBS TV reported. The Parliament office also confirmed the letter.
Uematsu boasted in the letter that he had the ability to kill 470 disabled people in what he called was "a revolution," and outlined an attack on two facilities, after which he said he will turn himself in. He also asked he be judged innocent on grounds of insanity, be given 500 million yen ($5 million) in aid and plastic surgery so he could lead a normal life afterward.
"My reasoning is that I may be able to revitalize the world economy and I thought it may be possible to prevent World War III," the letter says.
The letter was delivered before Uematsu's last day of work at the facility, but it was unclear whether the letter played a role in his firing, or even if his superiors had known about it.
The letter included Uematsu's name, address and telephone number, and reports of his threats were relayed to local police where Uematsu lived, Kyodo said.
Kanagawa Gov. Yuji Kuroiwa apologized for having failed to act on the warning signs.
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LawyerLady
I can explain it to you, but I can't understand it for you.
A flock of flirting flamingos is pure, passionate, pink pandemonium-a frenetic flamingle-mangle-a discordant discotheque of delirious dancing, flamboyant feathers, and flamingo lingo.
Evidently the staff was tied up with some kind of plastic ties used to hold patients hands to the bed, etc. I cannot figure out how ONE guy could over power the staff, tie them up and then go on a slaughter mission. Seems he was using drugs, so maybe had "superhuman" strength or was really terrifying to staff (not to mention the security guard who was there.) This whole thing just has so many unanswered questions......
