Japanese police have searched the home of the suspect in a mass stabbing spree at a facility for the mentally disabled in a neighbourhood west of Tokyo.
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In a chilling letter, penned in February, the suspect had called for the “euthanasia” of disabled people and said he would be willing to carry out the acts himself if needed.
Dozens of other residents were wounded in Tuesday’s early-morning attack at the Tsukui Yamayuri-En facility for the disabled in Sagamihara.
Satoshi Uematsu, 26, set out his plan to in a letter to the country’s parliament, intended for Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.
TOKYO (AP) – He wrote that he meant to kill disabled people and that his plot would benefit Japanese society. The facility where he worked was so unnerved, it confronted him. In the months that followed, his former workplace increased security, adding cameras to watch the buildings where 150 mentally disabled people resided. But he was left alone, free, unmonitored.
Uematsu was sent from a regional jail in the town of Sagamihara, around 25 miles southwest of Tokyo, to the Yokohama District Public Prosecutors Office in Kanagawa prefecture.
According to CNN.com, the attack is one of Japan’s deadliest mass killings since World Warr II. “We need to examine how that happened”. Prowling around the first floor, he opened a bag filled with knives.
Uematsu was sacked from the facility and admitted into a psychiatric ward in February after informing his coworkers of his plan to euthanize patients living at the center.
NHK also reported that he had had run-ins with the police – past year he had fought and injured a man at a suburban Tokyo train station. In the letter he delivered to the home of the speaker of the lower house of parliament on February 15, Uematsu wrote that killing disabled people is a public service.
Uematsu promised in the letters to execute the killings swiftly, without hurting staff and said he hoped to be found “not guilty by reason of insanity”.
Japanese police on Thursday continued investigating the country’s worst mass killings in decades at the facility for the disabled where 19 people were stabbed to death as the nation struggled to comprehend the motives behind the crime. Uematsu insisted that he was not wrong and quit the job.
Days later, he was questioned by police for handing out fliers near the facility that contained similar comments, and he was eventually committed to a mental hospital, where he was diagnosed as paranoid and dependent on weed.
The attack shocked neighbors, many of whom said they had a good relationship with both the staff and the residents of the home in the hilly, semi-rural community in Sagamihara. The official requested anonymity because of sensitivity of the issue.
Al Jazeera’s Harry Fawcett, reporting from Sagamihara, said the attack was “deeply disturbing” in so many levels: “The sheer scale and horrific nature of the attack, the twisted reasoning that apparently lay behind it and the fact that he set out in such a specific detail what he meant to do and was still able to do it”.
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But that’s a discussion that is also taking place at a wider, national level.
