Attacker grins before cameras
A Japanese man who admitted murdering 19 people at a center for the mentally disabled grinned at news cameras on Wednesday before being questioned over the country’s worst killing spree in decades.
Police searched the home of the 26-year-old, who reportedly said he wanted all disabled people to“disappear”, after the knife ram page that left his victims in pools of blood, including some who were stabbed in the neck.
With a blue jacket draped over his head, Satoshi Uematsu was escorted out of a police station into a waiting van before a crowd of flashing cameras.
Inside the vehicle with the jacket removed, he smiled broadly in footage broadcast on morning news shows.
Uematsu’s self-styled mission to rid the country of the mentally disabled — laid out earlier this year in along letter that came to light on Tuesday — has shocked Japan, as has the carnage at the Tsukui Ya may uri-en center in the city of Sagamihara, outside Tokyo.
Plainclothes police officers were seen searching his house where yellow tape declared it a no-entry zone. The two-storey dwelling is in the same neighborhood as the care center.
Local media said Uematsu has told police that he wants to apologize to bereaved families about the sudden loss of their loved ones, though he still justified what he did.
“I saved those with multiple disabilities,” he told police, according to private broadcaster TV Asahi, citing investigative sources.
Uematsu broke into the care center in the forested hills of Sagamihara in the early hours of Tuesday.
‘Appalling’
He tied up two caregivers before stabbing residents using a total of five knives — leaving a total of 26 people injured, 13 of them severely.
He quickly turned himself in at a police station, carrying bloodied knives and admitting to officers: “I did it.”
Uematsu reportedly also said: “The disabled should all disappear.”
The top-selling Yomiuri Shimbun daily called the case “appalling” and urged a probe of the decision to release Uematsu from medical care.
“It is a matter of great regret for society to let such a serious stabbing incident happen,” it said in an editorial which called for increased security at care facilities.
Japan has one of the lowest rates of violent crime in the developed world. The killing spree is believed to be the nation’s worst since 1938.