The facility’s name means “mountain lily garden” after the local flower that is in bloom at this time of year.
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The incident has left many people in shock.
Satoshi Uematsu, 26, is a former employee of the facility in the city of Sagamihara; police say he broke into its building around 2:30 a.m. Tuesday, committed murder, and later drove to the local police station.
Yuji Kuroiwa, the governor of Kanagawa prefecture where the facility is located, said he had been told that Uematsu had suddenly changed before he was encouraged to voluntarily resign in February. Nakatsuka said many other family members were waiting to hear about their relatives. In 2008 in Japan, 7 people were killed by a man who slammed a truck into a crowd of people in central Tokyo’s Akihabara electronics district.
Kitasato University Hospital admitted 13 of the injured patients who had been stabbed and slashed, with staff there saying that at least eight of them had suffered serious neck injuries.
The 26-year-old Japanese man who killed 19 mentally disabled people in a stabbing rampage had written a letter to Japan’s parliament detailing his plan months before he carried out the attack. “I did it”, he told police.
The 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.
He had three knives with him, at least one covered in blood, and tie cables in his auto. In two group photos posted on his Facebook, he looks happy, smiling widely with other young men.
The message: “I hope for world peace”.
An official from Kanagawa prefecture, which takes in Sagamihara, identified the suspect and said he had turned up at the police station with the murder weapons.
The letter was reprinted by Kyodo after the attack.
Ambulance crew and firefighters work today outside a facility for the handicapped where a knife attack took place near Tokyo…
According to letters Uematsu had written in February, he stated that his goal was: “a world in which the severely disabled can be euthanized, with their guardians’ consent, if they are unable to live at home and be active in society”. Another 25 were injured, many of them seriously with stab wounds. They are often kept at home by their closest of kin or housed in closed-off care facilities.
Japanese newspaper Asahi Shimbun reported that he told police: ‘I want to get rid of the disabled from this world’.
He was apparently allowed to go home to his house at the bottom of a dead-end road here, overlooking lush green fields.
“I was astonished, that’s the only thing I can say”, he said.
Since 1945, these kinds of massacres seem to occur about once a decade in Japan, and other terrible crimes are reported fairly regularly.
Hospital staff talking to the media said the death toll was likely to rise as many of those injured sustained life threatening injuries.
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Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said the government will do everything in its power to determine what and how the events at the care center unfolded with the aim to prevent such an incident happening again.
