Police search home of suspect in stabbing spree

Japanese police yesterday searched the home of the suspect in a mass stabbing spree that left 19 people dead at a facility for the mentally disabled.

The suspect, 26-year-old Satoshi Uematsu, was transferred earlier in the day from a local police station to the prosecutor’s office in Yokohama.

The attacker left dead or injured nearly a third of the approximately 150 patients at the facility in a matter of 40 minutes early Tuesday, Kanagawa prefectural authorities said. The fire department said 25 were wounded, 20 of them seriously.

Uematsu turned himself into police about two hours after the pre-dawn attack in Saga mai hara, a city about 50 kilometres west of central Tokyo.

He had worked at the facility until February, when he delivered a letter to Parliament outlining a bloody plan to attack two facilities for the handicapped and saying all disabled people should be put to death.

Kanagawa prefecture welfare department official Shogo Nakayama said that officials from the Sagamihara facility confronted him about the letter a few days later, and Uematsu quit.

His head and shoulders hidden with a blue jacket, the suspect was led out of a police station in Sagamihara yesterday morning and into the back of an unmarked white van with emergency lights on top. Photographers and video journalists swarmed the van as it pulled away.

At his house in Sagamihara police took in cardboard boxes to carry out any evidence. Parts of the property were sealed off with yellow police tape.

The parents of one of the seriously injured residents of the facility told Japanese television network NTV that their son is unconscious and on artificial respiration.

“I feel anger that he was a former worker,” the mother said of the attacker. NTV did not identify the parents or show their faces.

Uematsu broke into the Tsu kui Yama-yuri-en facility by shattering a window at 2:10 a.m., according to a prefectural health official, and then set about slashing the residents’ throats.

Sagamihara fire department official Kunio Takano said the dead were 10 women and nine men, ranging in age from 19 to 70. All those killed were residents, said Tat su hisa Hirosue, another Kanagawa welfare division official.