Police are now looking into the motive behind the attack, which happened in the city of Sagamihara, just west of Tokyo. “The disabled can only create misery”, reasoning that Uematsu’s killing spree was required to stimulate the world economy and maybe even prevent a World War III.
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In June 2008, a man ran over a group of people with his truck and then stabbed 18, killing seven, in Tokyo’s famous Akihabara gaming district.
The incident is believed to be the deadliest mass killing in modern Japanese history, surpassing the death toll of 12 in the 1995 sarin gas attack on a Tokyo subway station.
Authorities at the residential care facility for disabled people after Tuesday’s attack.
A White House statement expressed shock at the “heinous attack” and offered condolences to the families of those killed.
A doctor at one of the hospitals where victims were taken described some with “deep stab” wounds to the neck.
According to Japanese officials, when Uemetsu turned himself in, he said that he did it and that he thought that disabled people shouldn’t be allowed to exist and better off dead. No further details were available.
Nineteen people have been killed in a knife attack at a care home for people with mental disabilities in the Japanese city of Sagamihara.
The facility, set in extensive grounds, had about 150 residents at the time of the attack, according to local officials.
The Sagamihara facility is located in a valley nestled between mountains, at the end of a street of modest houses interspersed with persimmon orchards and vegetable gardens. According to police cited by the Asahi Shimbun daily, the suspect said: “The disabled should all disappear”. It demanded that all disabled people be put to death through “a world that allows for mercy killing”, Kyodo news agency and TBS TV reported.
“I will carry out a massacre without harming the staff”, Uematsu wrote in the letter, copies of which were broadcast by local media.
He said police and the government would work hard on the investigation “to grasp the whole picture”. “I’m speechless. I don’t know what to say”. The front gate of the facility and entrances to the buildings in which residents are living are all locked.
He had been working there since 2012, Motoko Rich, the New York Times’ Tokyo bureau chief, told CNN. “I will kill 470 disabled people”.
“That kind of person can’t defend themselves”. The incident shocks Japan and leads to increased security at schools.
The suspect, identified as 26-year-old Satoshi Uematsu, had worked at the facility from 2014 until February, when he was let go.
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They said the attack began in the early hours of the morning when Uematsu broke a first-floor window to get in.
