Multiple outlets have reported that an attacker wielding a knife has killed at least 19 people at an assisted living center in Japan.
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Police said there were several casualties but did not provide any numbers but the Sagamihara City fire brigade said 19 people died in the attack and that figure was confirmed by doctors at the scene.
A man turned himself in at a police station in Sagamihara about two hours later.
Uematsu told police he would kill many severely disabled people if the national government approved such an action, the official told Reuters by phone.
A call to police came from the facility around 2:30 a.m. local time Tuesday, Kyodo said.
While the motivation for the attack remains unknown, Rich reported that the suspect had taken a letter to the Japanese legislature outlining a society in which euthanasia of the disabled was accepted.
Kanagawa Gov. Yuji Kuroiwa apologized for having failed to act on the warning signs. The people who live there have a wide range of physical disabilities. The Associated Press reports that the knifeman has turned himself in.
“Accomplishing his goal was all he wanted”, Deguchi said on TV Asahi.
Michael Gillan Peckitt, a lecturer in clinical philosophy at Osaka University in central Japan, and an expert on disabled people’s issues in Japan, said the attack speaks more about Uematsu than the treatment of the disabled in Japan.
“It highlights the need for an early-intervention system in the Japanese mental health system”.
Mass killings are rare in Japan.
The attack may be one of Japan’s worst single-perpetrator mass murders in the postwar era.
The attack occurred in the city of Sagamilhara, a city just west of Tokyo.
In another incident eight children were stabbed to death at their school by a former janitor in 2001.
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And in 2008 a man ploughed a rental truck into a crowd of shoppers in Tokyo’s bustling Akihabara district before he stabbed passers-by, killing seven people and injuring 10 others.
