At least 25 other residents of the facility were wounded in the attack.
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Uematsu is a former employee of the the Tsukui Yamayuri En (Tsukui Lily Garden) facility and had worked there since 2012. 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.
While Japan, statistically, is often represented as a safe country, other deadly postwar mass murders here include the 1995 Aum Shinrikyo cults sarin gas attack on Tokyo’s subway system which killed 13 people and injured thousands more and a 1999 attack which saw a man ram his vehicle into a station in Shimonoseki station and go on a stabbing frenzy killing a total of 5 and injuring 10. Police said they responded to a call about 2:30 a.m. Tuesday from an employee saying something terrible was happening at the facility.
Uematsu turned himself into police around 3 am with a bag of bloody knives.
Police said they received a call from the centre around 2.30am – about 20 minutes after the assault began – reporting that a man armed with knives had entered the facility. A similar attack, involving a auto and a knife, occurred in 1999 in Shimonoseki and left five people dead.
He was initially “arrested on charges of trespassing and attempted murder”, reported the Los Angeles Times.
Kyodo news agency identified the attacker as Satoshi Uematsu and said he had been arrested. The man wore a black T-shirt and pants, reports said.
Kanagawa Gov. Yuji Kuroiwa expressed his condolences to the victims.
“Doctors confirmed the deaths of 19 people”, the fire department official told AFP.
Such bloodshed is highly unusual in Japan, which had one gun death past year, and the attack was shaping up to be the worst single-perpetrator mass murder in modern Japanese history.
“I hope that disabled people will disappear (from this world)”, he told police.
“I was surprised to hear that the culprit was a person from this neighborhood”, she said. He was wearing a black T-shirt and black pants, and three knives were found in his bag.
Alleged killer Satoshi Uematsu was a former employee of the facility, and although reasons of his departure are still murky, speculations have arisen that he quit abruptly in February after being chastised about abusive remarks aimed at residents.
The dead ranged in age from 19 to 70 and included nine males and 10 females, Kyodo said.
In 2001, a man killed eight children and injured 13 others in a knife attack at an elementary school in the city of Osaka.
Still in Japan there have been a number of recent attacks on the disabled and elderly.
Japanese police guard the main gate to the Tsukui Yamayuri-en care center, where a knife-wielding man went on a rampage, in the city of Sagamihara.
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A man who lives near the site of the latest attack said he was shocked such an attack happened in the quiet, semi-rural area near Mount Takao, a mountain popular with hikers. Inabayashi said he never imagined such a frightful thing had happened. “I’m speechless. I don’t know what to say”.
