July 26, 2016: Nineteen people are confirmed dead in the knife attack on mentally disabled people at a facility outside Tokyo.
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Police said Uematsu entered the facility at about 2:10 a.m., Tuesday, local time, by breaking a ground floor window with a hammer, then apparently went room to room stabbing anyone he saw.
A man turned himself in at a police station about two hours later, police in Sagamihara said. NHK said 15 people were killed and 20 were wounded.
The facility is located some 50 km from central Tokyo in a residential area surrounded by houses and an elementary school and housed residents aged between 18 and 70 years of age, with 40 of them believed to be aged over 60. Numerous victims who died had their necks slashed, and bloodstains were found in many places inside the facility.
Earlier in the day, Uematsu, 26, was arrested in Sagamihara, west of Tokyo, as he surrendered to police after killing 19 and injuring 25 disabled people during their sleep at the facility.
The attacker was carrying three knives in a bag, some of which were bloodstained, according to police. Police are yet to establish the background motive for the attack however the suspect was reportedly “involuntarily admitted” to hospital earlier on in the year for under two weeks after claiming that he would kill disabled people.
Hasegawa also said that he had seen an extensive shoulder-to-chest tattoo on Uematsu and there was a rumour in the neighbourhood he might have been fired from the facility because of it.
In February, he tried to hand-deliver a letter he wrote to parliament’s lower house speaker demanding all disabled people be put to death through “a world that allows for mercy killing”, the Kyodo news agency and TBS TV reported. He reportedly wrote that he would conduct an attack “during night shift hours when fewer workers are there” and said that he would “tie workers with bands so that they can not move and communicate with outside people”.
Kanagawa Gov. Yuji Kuroiwa apologized for having failed to act on the warning signs.
There have been conflicting reports about exactly how many people were killed and injured.
Tuesday’s incident was the deadliest mass killing in the country since the end of World War II. Mass murders are rare in the country, where tight gun control laws exist.
“I send condolences from my bottom of my heart to the many people who died and those who were seriously injured”, said Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. ” Exactly seven years before, on June 8, 2001, Mamoru Takuma killed eight children at the primary school where he’d previously been a janitor”.
In 1995, members of a Japanese doomsday cult released sarin gas in the Tokyo subway system, killing 13 people and causing thousands of commuters to fall ill in a crime that deeply dented Japan’s sense of security.
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Japan’s top government spokesman has called the knife attack that killed at least 19 people outside Tokyo “very tragic and shocking”.
