The neighbours of a mentally diabled people facility woke up on Tuesday morning to a shocking scene after a manbroke into the facility at night when everyone was asleep and stabbed 19 residents to death while wounding dozens more in what has been termed as Japan’s worst mass killing in ages.
An eye witness, one Masae Mizoguchi said “This kind of thing does not happen in this country. These atrocities were committed so close to me,” said the 78-year-old.
The residents of the facility were severely disabled, and were asleep at the time of the attack hence his ability to kill so many according to Mizoguchi.
Another neighbor Oshikazu Shimo said that the town is quiet and peaceful and so she would never have thought such an incident would happen there.
The city police have arrested Satoshi Uematsu, 26, who formerly worked at the facility. A Sagamihara city official said later that Uematsu had been involuntarily committed to hospital on Feb 19th for fear that he would cause harm others.
He had drawn the authority’s attention after saying he was eager to kill severely incapacitated people, but was discharged on March 2nd after a medic supposed his condition had improved.
In February, the suspect had tried to hand deliver a letter he wrote to the speaker of the lower house, demanding all disabled people be killed through euthanasia. Uematsu boasted in the letter that he had the ability to kill in what he termed a revolution, and outlined an attack on two facilities, after which he said he would turn himself in. He also asked he be acquitted of the charges on grounds of insanity, be given 0.5 billion yen in aid and plastic surgery so he could lead a normal life afterward.
The letter was reproduced by Kyodo after the attack.
Japan’s worst previous mass killing was in 2008, when a man drove a truck into a crowd and began stabbing people in Tokyo’s popular electronics and “anime” district of Akihabara, killing seven people. In 2001, a knife-wielding man killed eight students in an elementary school in Ikeda in Osaka Prefecture.
