Armed with multiple knives, the 26-year-old former employee at the facility proceeded to kill 19 patients and injure another 26. According to police cited by the Asahi Shimbun daily, the suspect said: “The disabled should all disappear”.
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Uematsu boasted in the letter that he had the ability to kill 470 disabled people in what he called “a revolution”, and outlined an attack on two facilities, after which he said he would turn himself in.
Broadcaster NTV said the man told police he had been fired and held a grudge against the care centre.
“The patients are very shocked mentally, and they can not speak now”, the doctor told NHK.
Security camera footage played on TV news programs showed a man driving up in a black auto and carrying several knives to the Tsukui Yamayuri-en facility in Sagamihara, 50 kilometers (30 miles) west of Tokyo.
At least 25 other residents of the facility were wounded during the attack, 20 of them seriously.
An official from Kanagawa prefecture, which takes in Sagamihara, identified the suspect and said he had turned up at the police station with the murder weapons.
Early Tuesday morning in Sagamihara, a city about 35 miles west of Tokyo, a man entered a home for disabled people by sneaking through a window while residents were sleeping.
Uematsu, who was carrying a bag full of bloodied knives and blades when he arrived at the police station, lived half a km away from the facility, and now undergoing mental health checks, sources said.
He had a bag full of knives and other edged tools, some with bloodstains, when he turned himself in, Kyodo reported.
-In February, Uematsu sent a letter to the speaker of the lower house of Japan’s Parliament detailing his plan for the massacre.
Uematsu was hospitalised on February 19, reportedly the same day he left his job, but was discharged 12 days later when a doctor deemed he was not a threat, the Sagamihara official said.
People in Uematsu’s neighbourhood, about a 10-minute walk from the crime scene, expressed disbelief.
He was a “normal, nice boy” who always smiled and offered a greeting, said next-door neighbour Akihiro Hasegawa.
Yoshihide Suga, chief cabinet secretary, told a news conference: “This is a very heart-wrenching and shocking incident in which many innocent people became victims”.
He confirmed that there was no terror link with ISIS, and added that information from the police department and health officials would be analysed to prevent such incidents from occurring again.
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“It’s unthinkable that something like this could happen not just in Japan but, here in our community”, Mitsuo Kishi, a 76-year-old man who lives near Uematsu, also told the Post.
