A man in his 20s was arrested Tuesday morning after fatally stabbing 15 people and wounding 45 others at a facility for people with disabilities in Kanagawa Prefecture, NHK reported.
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Another 25 were wounded, 20 of them seriously, in the attack in Sagamihara city, 50 kilometres west of Tokyo, a local fire department spokesman said.
Satoshi Uematsu, a 26-year-old who worked at the facility until February, broke in through a window about 2 a.m. Tuesday (1 p.m. ET Monday), Kanagawa Prefecture officials said at a news conference. The man said he used to work at the facitlity, the police said.
The alleged assailant turned himself in after 3:00 am (local time), admitting he had carried out the attack, a police spokesman said.
The death toll could make this the worst mass killing in Japan in the post-World War II era. “Then ambulances began arriving, and blood-covered people were taken away”.
Japanese broadcaster NTV reported that Uematsu was upset because he had been fired, but that could not be independently confirmed.
Mass killings are rare in Japan, which has strict gun laws.
At an elementary school in Osaka on June 8, 2001, a janitor stabbed a number of children with a kitchen knife.
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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. “I was astonished, that’s the only thing I can say”.
