Police have arrested a local man, said to be a former employee of the centre, who went to a nearby police station and allegedly admitted to the attack. Local reports said the man who carried out the attack had dyed blond hair.
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Police have arrested Satoshi Uematsu, 26, a former employee at the facility in Sagamihara town in Kanagawa Prefecture, about 25 miles (40 km) southwest of Tokyo, a Kanagawa official said.
Police said they responded to a call about 2:30 a.m. from an employee saying something awful is happening at the facility in the city of Sagamihara. Eight staff members were on duty at the time.
One doctor told NHK: “The patients are very shocked mentally, and they can not speak now”.
Police had cordoned off the centre, with yellow “Keep out” tape around the one-storey building nestled against forested hills.
Another 25 were wounded, 20 of them seriously, in the attack in Sagamihara city, 50km west of Tokyo, a local fire department spokesman said.
Kanagawa prefecture welfare official Susumu Yamazaki says the residents who were not hurt had to vacate their usual living quarters while police investigated the attack Tuesday.
Police said Uematsu broke into the facility at around 2:10 a.m. and stabbed residents there in rapid succession.
Terror-stricken staff at the care facility rang police after the suspect launched his attack, reported to be Satoshi Uematsu. His motive for the assault remains unclear.
Police said they received a call from the centre around 2.30am – about 20 minutes after the assault began – reporting that a man armed with knives had entered the facility.
One local resident, Chikara Inabayashi 68, told AFP he had been woken by the sound of sirens at about 03:00. It is Japan’s worst mass killing since World War Two.
July 26, 2016: Nineteen people are confirmed dead in the knife attack on mentally disabled people at a facility outside Tokyo. “Like in foreign countries, I think institutions need to develop a plan in operational management and prepare for a worst-case scenario, given that criminals are inevitably born”.
In June 2008, Tomohiro Kato, murdered seven people by driving a truck into a crowd of shoppers in Tokyo’s Akihabara district and jumping out to slash pedestrians with a knife.
A revision to Japan’s Swords and Firearms Control Law was introduced in 2009 in the wake of that attack, banning the possession of double-edged knives and further tightening gun-ownership rules.
Weird plot Japan’s most infamous modern mass murder came in 1995 when the Aum Shinrikyo doomsday cult gassed the Tokyo subway in a freaky plot to take over the government.
“I am able to kill a total of 470 disabled people”, part of the contents of his letter read.
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.
Close Japanese ally the United States quickly offered sympathy.
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Michael Gillan Peckitt, a lecturer in clinical philosophy at Osaka University in central Japan, and an expert on disabled people’s issues in Japan, said the attack speaks more about Uematsu than the treatment of the disabled in Japan.
