Japan knife attacker sent letter advocating for killing the disabled, officials say
SAGAMIHARA, Japan –(FOX)- A young Japanese man went on a stabbing rampage Tuesday at a facility for the mentally disabled where 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.
When he was done, Kanagawa prefectural authorities said, 26-year-old Satoshi Uematsu had left dead or injured nearly a third of the almost 150 patients at the facility in a matter of 40 minutes in the early Tuesday attack. It is Japan’s deadliest mass killing in decades. The fire department said 25 were wounded, 20 of them 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. Kanagawa prefecture welfare division official Tatsuhisa Hirosue said many details weren’t clear because those who might know were still being questioned by police.
The suspect calmly turned himself in about two hours after the attack, police said.
Uematsu had worked at Tsukui Yamayuri-en, which means mountain lily garden, from 2012 until February, when he was let go. He knew the staffing would be down to just a handful in the wee hours of the morning, Japanese media reports said.