Earlier media reports had said as many as 45 people had been wounded.
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Officials said the attacker was held two hours later on suspicion of attempted murder and trespassing. “I’m speechless. I don’t know what to say”. He was also heard saying, “The disabled should all disappear”, reported TOI. He presented a bag with three blood-smeared knives, among other tools. Police officers outside the station would not confirm that it was his vehicle.
Moreover, local police have said the suspect sent a handwritten letter to politicians in February in which he threatened to kill hundreds of disabled people.
Uematsu was said to use a hammer to break the window, Nippon TV reported. Local media had reported it was the vehicle Uematsu drove to the station for his confession, broadcasting images of a bloody steering wheel and plastic ties scattered on a seat.
Nineteen people are “in a state of cardiac arrest” after an attack by a knife-wielding man at a facility for the disabled in Kanagawa prefecture, southwest of Tokyo, a prefectural official said today. The injured have been taken to nearby hospitals so that they can be attended to properly. Twenty-nine emergency squads responded to the attack, Kyodo reported.
Staff at the Tsukui Yamayuri facility called police at around 2.30am on Tuesday after spotting a man armed with a knife in the grounds.
“I’m very anxious but they won’t let me in”, he said, standing just outside a cordon of yellow crime-scene tape.
Some people in the area said they were shocked that Uematsu is accused, and described him as polite and upstanding.
“It’s just horrific”, one resident told NHK. The attacker entered the facility at about 02:30 local time and began stabbing those inside.
A woman who lives opposite the centre told NHK: “I was told by a policeman to stay inside my house, as it could be risky”.
The statement by National Security Council spokesman Ned Price said “there is never any excuse for such violence, but the fact that this attack occurred at a facility for persons with disabilities makes it all the more repugnant and senseless”. The facility has a swimming pool, gym and medical clinic, according to Kyodo. Some 149 people aged between 18 to 75 live at the facility and all are intellectually disabled but some also have physical disabilities and mental disorders.
In 2001, a man killed eight children and injured 13 others in a knife attack at an elementary school in the city of Osaka.
8 June 2008 – a man drove a truck into a packed shopping district at Akihabara in Tokyo, before climbing out and randomly stabbing people.
In 2010, 14 were injured by an unemployed man who stabbed and beat up passengers on two public buses outside a Japanese train station in Ibaraki Prefecture, about 25 miles (40 kilometers) northeast of Tokyo.
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The last time Sagamihara made global headlines was in 2012 when Naoko Kikuchi, a member of the Japanese doomsday cult responsible for the 1995 nerve gas attack on the Tokyo subway, was arrested there. That attack killed 12.
