Ambulance crew and firefighters work today outside a facility for the handicapped where a knife attack took place near Tokyo.
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Uematsu had turned himself in, the official told a news conference carried on public broadcaster NHK.
Police in Sagamihara, Kanagawa Prefecture, about 25 miles (40 km) southwest of Tokyo, have arrested Satoshi Uematsu, a 26-year-old former employee at the facility, he said.
Three people appearing to be a family showed up to lay flowers, but they were unable to do so, as police prevented them from coming close to the property.
Another 25 people were wounded, 20 of them seriously, Sakuma said.
A fire department official in the Japanese city where a knife attack at a facility for the mentally disabled left 19 people dead says the victims included 10 women and nine men.
Japanese authorities say they are investigating the motive of the lone knife-wielding attacker who broke into the Tsukui Yamayuri-En facility for disabled people early Tuesday, killing 19 residents and wounding dozens more. Japanese media reports said he is 26 years old.
“A letter the attacker sent before being fired from the facility indicates that he knew staffing would be low late in the night, allowing him to get in and ‘wipe out, ‘ in his words, 260 disabled persons across two homes”. The facility, with its 30,000-square-metre area, can house up to 160 residents and according to local sources as many as 149 residents were on site when the attack happened, many of whom are believed to be in their sixties.
The operator of the care home said Uematsu had broken into the facility by smashing a window with a hammer at the east residential building. Kyodo later said the death toll stood at 19. Both girls and men were reported to be one of the dead. Surrounded by tree-covered mountains and on the banks of the Sagami River, it cares for people with a wide range of disabilities.
Kiyoshi Nakatsuka, 73, the vice chairman of the parents’ group for residents at the center, said his son, in his 40s, was lucky enough to escape the killings, NHK reported.
Naoko Kikuchi, one of the most wanted people in Japan for her involvement in the attacks, had been hiding in the city under the name Chizuko Sakurai.
It is Japan’s deadliest mass killing in decades.
8 June 2001 – man with a history of mental illness stabbed eight children to death at an Osaka primary school in 2001. In 2008, seven people were killed by a man who slammed a truck into a crowd of people in central Tokyo’s Akihabara electronics district and then stabbed passers-by.
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Members of a doomsday cult killed 12 people and made thousands ill in 1995 in simultaneous attacks with sarin nerve gas on five Tokyo rush-hour subway trains.
