Police have arrested Satoshi Uematsu, 26, a former employee at the facility, a Kanagawa official said.
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NHK reported that the facility is usually locked at night but the man broke into the building by smashing a window. He later turned himself in, according to police reports. NHK said 15 people were killed and 20 were wounded.
The former employee also reportedly admitted killing two more residents in their 80s and 90s by throwing them from balconies in 2014.
At least 19 people have been killed and as many as 45 injured in an attack on a disability centre in Japan, say reports.
The knife-wielding man carried out the attack at Tsukui Yamayuri-en, a facility for the disabled in Sagamihara, shortly after 2:30 a.m. Tuesday, local police were quoted as saying.
Mass killings are rare in Japan, which has strict gun laws.
Fire department medics and police staff inside the Tsukui Yamayuri-en residential care facility.
He said police together with government will work hard on the investigation “to grasp the whole picture”.
A father who has his child living at the facility told NHK: “I heard of the news on the radio and came here at 5 a.m. but I can’t get inside and don’t know what’s going on”.
The killing is believed to be the worst such incident in Japan since 1938, when a man went on a killing spree armed with an axe, sword and rifle, killing 30 people.
“Many of the facility residents can not communicate very well verbally, because they are rather seriously disabled, but we smile at each other and dance together with the help of caretakers and volunteers”, she said.
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The last time Sagamihara made global headlines was in 2012 when Naoko Kikuchi, a member of the Japanese doomsday cult responsible for the 1995 nerve gas attack on the Tokyo subway, was arrested there. In 2008, seven people were killed by a man who drove a lorry into a crowd of people in central Tokyo’s Akihabara electronics district, then stabbed passers-by.
