Following a fatal stabbing spree carried out by a lone male assailant at a care facility for people with disabilities in Kanagawa Prefecture west of Tokyo in the early hours of Tuesday morning, 19 people have been left killed and nearly 30 others injured of which 20 have sustained critical wounds, local police and investigative sources said.
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Uematsu, wearing a black tee shirt reportedly turned himself into the police and the Asahi Shimbun newspaper said he told police, “I want to get rid of the disabled from this world”.
“Police arrested Satoshi Uematsu, a 26-year-old former employee of the facility in the city of Sagamihara, as he turned himself in to a local police station at around 3 a.m., about 15 minutes after the facility staff alerted the police about the stabbing spree”, Japan’s Kyodo News reported.
The Sagamihara City fire department says that 19 people are confirmed dead in the attack on a facility for the disabled outside Tokyo. He had three knives with him, at least one covered in blood, and tie cables in his auto.
Kanagawa Gov. Yuji Kuroiwa apologized for having failed to act on the warning signs.
Uematsu carried out the attack on the sleeping people by climbing in through the window at 2 a.m. local time on July 26 and methodically stabbing residents.
Details of how he did that, and if the victims were asleep or otherwise helpless, were not immediately known, although a cryptic letter he sent to Japan’s Parliament in February gave a peek into Uematsu’s dark turmoil. Members of a Japanese Doomsday cult killed 13 people and caused thousands of commuters to fall ill during that attack, which cause widespread fear in the country.
Authorities at the residential care facility for disabled people after Tuesday’s attack. Officials said about 150 people, ranging in age from 19 to 75, live at the care home.
Kanagawa Prefectural officials said at a news conference that Uematsu worked at the care facility from 2012 to February 2016 and that he left “for personal reasons”.
During his time under treatment, Uematsu tested positive for marijuana use, according to the spokesperson.
“This kind of incident is never heard of in Japan”, Teruaki Sugimoto, a 66-year-old man who lives nearby the facility where the attack took place, told the Washington Post’s Anna Fifield.
Uematsu is being held in police custody.
In 2001, eight children at a primary school in Osaka were stabbed to death. “My daughter knew the culprit, I mean, they were acquainted”. Many of Uematsu’s neighbors could not imagine him doing this.
Mass killings are rare in Japan, which has strict gun laws.
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In 2008 in Tokyo a man ploughed a rental truck into a crowd of shoppers in Tokyo’s bustling Akihabara district before he stabbed passers-by, killing seven people and injuring 10 others.
