Developing | ‘It’s better the disabled disappear’: 19 people stabbed to death at Japanese care facility by ‘euthanasia advocate’
Attacker who used to work at facility surrenders to police while carrying a bag full of bloodstained knives
In Japan’s worst mass killing in decades, 19 disabled people were stabbed to death in their sleep and 25 people were wounded by a knife-wielding man at a facility for the disabled in Japan early on Tuesday.
Police in Sagamihara, Kanagawa Prefecture, about 40km southwest of Tokyo, have arrested Satoshi Uematsu, a 26-year-old former employee at the facility and reported euthanasia advocate, who drove to a police station to turn himself in soon after the attack.
Uematsu had a bag full of knives and other edged tools, some bloodstained, when he surrendered, police said.
“This is a very heart-wrenching and shocking incident in which many innocent people became victims,” Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga told a news conference in Tokyo.
Officers said staff called police at 2.30am local time with reports of a man armed with a knife on the grounds of the Tsukui Yamayuri-En facility.
Kanagawa prefectural police arrested Uematsu, 26, after he drove to the Tsukui Police Station and turned himself around 3 am Tuesday, saying “I did it.”
“It’s better that the disabled disappear,” the police quoted him as saying.
Broadcaster NTV reported that Uematsu presented a letter to the speaker of the lower house of Japan’s parliament in February calling for euthanasia of disabled people.
“My goal is a world in which, in cases where it is difficult for the severely disabled to live at home and be socially active, they can be euthanised with the consent of their guardians,” it quoted the letter as saying.
The police arrested him on suspicion of attempted murder and unlawful entry to a building.
The wounded were taken to at least six hospitals in the western Tokyo area. Twenty of the 25 injured were in serious conditions; an earlier report had said 45 were wounded.
Kyodo news agency said the dead ranged in age from 19 to 70 and included nine males and 10 females.
Twenty-nine emergency squads responded to the attack, Kyodo said.
“We are still confirming details of the case,” a police spokesman added.
A man identified as the father of a patient in the facility told NHK he learned about the attack on the radio and had received no information from the centre.
“I’m very worried but they won’t let me in,” he said, standing just outside a cordon of yellow crime-scene tape.
A woman who said she used to work at the facility said many patients were profoundly disabled.
“They are truly innocent people. What did they do? This is shocking,” she told Japanese television station TBS.
Kyodo, citing the facility’s website, said the centre had a maximum capacity of 150 people.
Such mass killings are rare in Japan. Eight children were stabbed to death at their school by a former janitor in 2001. Members of a doomsday cult killed 12 people and made thousands ill in 1995 in simultaneous attacks with sarin nerve gas on five Tokyo rush-hour subway trains.
Additional reporting by Kyodo
