Ex-staffer detailed knife plot in letter, Japan says
SAGAMIHARA, Japan — A 26-year-old Japanese man went on a stabbing rampage Tuesday at a facility for the mentally disabled from which he had been fired, officials said, killing 19 people months after he gave a letter to Parliament outlining the bloody plan and saying all disabled people should be put to death.
Kanagawa prefectural authorities said Satoshi Uematsu left dead or injured nearly a third of the almost 150 patients at the facility early Tuesday.
It is Japan’s deadliest mass killing in decades. The fire department said 25 were wounded, 20 seriously.
Security camera footage played on TV news programs showed a man driving up in a black car and carrying several knives to the Tsukui Yamayuri-en facility in Sagamihara, 30 miles west of Tokyo. The man broke in by shattering a window at 2:10 a.m., according to a prefectural health official, and then set about slashing the patients’ throats.
Sagamihara fire department official Kunio Takano said the attacker killed 10 women and nine men. The youngest was 19; the oldest 70.
Details of the attack, including whether the victims were asleep or otherwise helpless, were not immediately known.
The suspect turned himself in about two hours after the attack, police said.
Uematsu had worked at Tsukui Yamayuri-en from 2012 until February, when he was let go. He knew the staffing would be down to a handful in the wee hours of the morning, Japanese media reports said.
Uematsu had once dreamed of becoming a teacher. In two group photos posted on Facebook, he looks happy, smiling with other young men.
“It was so much fun today. Thank you, all. Now I am 23, but please be friends forever,” a 2013 post says.
But somewhere along the way, things went terribly awry.
In February, Uematsu tried to hand deliver a letter to Parliament’s lower house speaker that revealed his turmoil. It demanded that all disabled people be put to death through “a world that allows for mercy killing,” Kyodo news agency and TBS TV reported. The Parliament office also confirmed the letter.
Uematsu boasted in the letter that he had the ability to kill 470 disabled people in what he called was “a revolution,” and outlined an attack on two facilities, after which he said he would turn himself in. He also asked he be judged innocent on grounds of insanity, be given $5 million in aid and plastic surgery so he could lead a normal life afterward.
The letter included Uematsu’s name, address and telephone number, and reports of his threats were relayed to local police where Uematsu lived, Kyodo said.
Kanagawa Gov. Yuji Kuroiwa apologized for having failed to act on the warning signs.
Mass killings are rare in Japan.