Killer told officials of plan to kill disabled

SAGAMIHARA, JAPAN — A mass stabbing near Tokyon on Tuesday at a centre for people with disabilities shocked Japan, where violent crimes are extremely rare.

A former employee who had expressed strong views about euthanizing disabled people returned to the facility with a bag of knives at around 2 a.m., methodically slitting the throats of patients as they slept.

When he left the building 30 minutes later, 19 people were dead in the worst mass killing in Japan since the Second World War. The dead ranged in age from 19 to 70. Twenty-six people were wounded, 13 of them critically.

The suspect, Satoshi Uematsu, 26, who had sent a letter to a politician five months ago outlining his plan, calmly turned himself in at a nearby police station a half-hour after the attacks. As he confessed, he told authorities, “All the handicapped should disappear.”

He was charged with attempted murder. Additional charges were expected.

Many pieces of the puzzle were still missing late Tuesday as police cordoned off the facility, called Tsukui Yamayuri-en, and blocked access to witnesses and victims’ relatives.

But the details that emerged sketched a portrait of a deeply disturbed young man with a grudge against his employer and violent ideas about ridding the world of disabled people.

Uematsu had tried to warn authorities of his plans in February, when he sent a letter to the speaker of the lower house of Parliament. He wrote that he would conduct an attack “during night shift hours when fewer workers are there” and that he would “tie workers with bands so that they cannot move and communicate with outside people.”

In the letter, he named the facility he attacked Tuesday, as well as another centre whose location officials declined to reveal.

Guns are strictly regulated in Japan, and few civilians own them. Until now, the biggest mass killing here in the postwar period was a sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway system in 1995, which killed 13.