Uematsu, who gave himself up to police on Tuesday after the attack, had said in letters he wrote in February that he could “obliterate 470 disabled people” and gave detailed plans of how he would do so, Kyodo news agency reported.
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His head and shoulders covered with a blue jacket, 26-year-old Satoshi Uematsu was led out of a police station in Sagamihara city and into the back of an unmarked white van with emergency lights on top.
While Japan, statistically, is often represented as a safe country, other deadly postwar mass murders here include the 1995 Aum Shinrikyo cults sarin gas attack on Tokyo’s subway system which killed 13 people and injured thousands more and a 1999 attack which saw a man ram his vehicle into a station in Shimonoseki station and go on a stabbing frenzy killing a total of 5 and injuring 10. Uematsu went to the residence again the next day, and reportedly left the letter with a police officer.
Three people appearing to be a family showed up to lay flowers, but they were unable to do so, as police prevented them from coming close to the property.
Tsukui Yamayuri-en, which means mountain lily garden, was a facility Uematsu knew well, having worked there since 2012 until he was sacked in February.
Uematsu had also delivered a letter to the office of Japanese lawmaker Tadamori Oshima on February 15 which allegedly stated, “I envision a world where a person with multiple disabilities can be euthanized, with an agreement from the guardians, when it is hard for the person to carry out household and social activities”. Police notes, that Uematsu was an ex-employee of this facility, he worked there from 12/2012 to 02/2016, until he was hospitalized in late February.
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. He was kept in hospital for nearly two weeks before being released.
Japan’s most popular newspaper, the Yomiuri, said on Tuesday that care homes for the elderly and disabled may now have to consider following suit.
According to a senior official of the Kanagawa prefectural police, some staff members of Yamayuri-en were bound with zip ties.
Another 25 people were wounded, 20 of them seriously, Sakuma said.
The suspect was named in local media as 26-year-old Satoshi Uematsu. He entered a police station later in afternoon carrying a bag of knives he apparently used.
“It’s unthinkable that something like this could happen not just in Japan but, here in our community”, said Mitsuo Kishi, a 76-year-old who lives a few hundred yards from Uematsu’s house.
“They are truly innocent people”. The dead include 10 men and nine women ranging in age between 19 and 70. “I dream of a world where the disabled can die in peace”, Uematsu wrote in the letter. Many note that mass killings are rare in Japan in part because guns are not easily available. In 2001, a knife-wielding man killed eight students in an elementary school in Ikeda in Osaka Prefecture.
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Officials said the attacker was held two hours later on suspicion of attempted murder and trespassing.
