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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While the incentive for the attack is still unknown, it was reported that he had delivered a letter to the legislative arm of Japan outlining a social order where euthanasia of the physically challenged was accepted. It is the worst mass killing in Japan’s history since World War II.
Twenty of the wounded were seriously injured.
He turned himself in at a police station, carrying bloodied knives and admitting to officers: “I did it”. The man broke in by shattering a window at 2:10 a.m., according to a prefectural health official, and then set about slashing the patients’ throats.
Details of the attack, including whether the victims were asleep or otherwise helpless, were not immediately known.
He calmly turned himself in about two hours after the attack, police said.
The attack took place at the Tsukui Yamayuri En (Tsukui Lily Garden), a residential home for disabled people run by Kanagawa Prefecture, about 50 kilometers (31 miles) outside Tokyo. Japanese media reports said he was 26 years old. He said Uematsu was also “trying to become a teacher and had taught in training at a nearby elementary school”. In two group photos posted on his Facebook, he looks happy, smiling widely with other young men.
“It was so much fun today. Thank you, all. Now I am 23, but please be friends forever”, a 2013 post says.
But somewhere along the way, things went awry.
NTV reported that the letter Uematsu allegedly wrote calling for euthanasia for disabled people said: “My goal is a world in which, in cases where it is hard for the severely disabled to live at home and be socially active, they can be euthanised with the consent of their guardians”.
In February, Uematsu took a letter to the speaker of the House of Representatives in which he threatened to carry out the attack.
Authorities identified the attacker as Satoshi Uematsu and said he had worked at the care centre for mentally disabled people in Sagamihara, a city of more than 700,000 people west of Tokyo, until February.
In it, Uematsu described detailed plans on how he planned to carry out such an attack during the night when there were few staff working.
A woman who lives across from the facility told Japanese broadcaster NHK that she saw police cars enter the facility around 3:30 a.m.
“He was just an ordinary young fellow”, he said. “I did it”, police quoted Uematsu as saying.
Uematsu was committed to hospital after he expressed a “willingness to kill severely disabled people”, an official in Sagamihara told Reuters. “Someone doesn’t get to that state without some symptoms of mental illness”, he said. “I don’t understand why such a cheerful person would do this”. ” Exactly seven years before, on June 8, 2001, Mamoru Takuma killed eight children at the primary school where he’d previously been a janitor”.
Japan, especially Tokyo is still in shock.
As recent as earlier this month, a man stabbed four people at a library in northeastern Japan, allegedly over their improper handling of his questions, although no one died.
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Kageyama reported from Tokyo.
