Knife attacker in Japan kills 19 in their
sleep at disabled center
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[July 26, 2016]
By Elaine Lies and Kwiyeon Ha
SAGAMIHARA, Japan (Reuters) - A
knife-wielding man broke into a facility for the disabled in a small
town near Tokyo early on Tuesday and killed 19 patients as they slept,
authorities said, Japan's worst mass killing in decades.
At least 25 other residents were wounded in the attack at the Tsukui
Yamayuri-En facility in Sagamihara town, about 25 miles (40 km)
southwest of Tokyo.
"This is a very heart-wrenching and shocking incident in which many
innocent people became victims," Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga
told a regular news conference in Tokyo.
The suspect was a 26-year-old former employee of the facility who gave
himself up to police. The man, Satoshi Uematsu, said in letters he wrote
in February that he could "obliterate 470 disabled people", Kyodo news
agency reported.
He said he would kill 260 severely disabled people at two areas in the
facility during a night shift, and would not hurt employees.
"My goal is a world in which the severely disabled can be euthanized,
with their guardians’ consent, if they are unable to live at home and be
active in society," Uematsu wrote in the two letters given to the
speaker of the lower house of parliament, Kyodo reported.
Uematsu was committed to hospital after he expressed a "willingness to
kill severely disabled people", an official in Sagamihara told Reuters.
He was freed on March 2 after a doctor deemed he had improved, the
official said.
Uematsu lived near the facility, and a neighbor described him as a
polite, young man who always greeted him with a smile.

"It would be easier to understand if there had been a warning but there
were no signs," said Akihiro Hasegawa, 73. "We didn't know the darkness
of his heart."
The suspect apparently began changing about five months ago, said Yuji
Kuroiwa, the governor of Kanagawa prefecture, where the facility is
located.
"You could say there were warning signs, but it's difficult to say if
this could have been prevented," he told reporters.
"This was not an impulsive crime ... He went in the dark of the night,
opened one door at a time, and stabbed sleeping people one by one,"
Kuroiwa said. "I just can't believe the cruelty of this crime. We need
to prevent this from ever happening again."
Staff at the facility called police at 2.30 a.m. local time (1730 GMT
Monday) with reports of a man armed with a knife on the grounds, media
reports said. The man wore a black T-shirt and trousers, the reports
said.
The 3-hectare (7.6 acre) facility was established by the local
government. Surrounded by tree-covered mountains and on the banks of the
Sagami River, it cares for people with a wide range of disabilities.
The facility's website said the center had a maximum capacity of 160
people, including staff.
"IT MAKES YOU WEEP"
Japan has one of the lowest crime rates in the world and residents of
Sagamihara said they were in shock. The last murder in the area was 10
years ago.
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A facility for the disabled (L), where a deadly attack by a
knife-wielding man took place, is seen in Sagamihara, Kanagawa
prefecture, Japan, July 26, 2016. REUTERS/Issei Kato

"This is a peaceful, quiet town so I never thought such an incident
would happen here," said Oshikazu Shimo, one of many residents of
the town who gathered near the facility.
Taxi driver Susumu Fujimura said of the attacker: "He said 'we
should get rid of disabled people' but he's the worthless one."
"That kind of person can't defend themselves," Fujimura said,
referring to the victims. "That's why so many died. It makes you
weep to think of somebody just murdering them."
The dead ranged in age from 19 to 70 and included nine males and 10
females, Kyodo said.
Police had recovered a bag with several knives, at least one stained
with blood, a Kanagawa prefecture official said.
At least 29 emergency squads responded to the attack, Kyodo
reported, with those wounded taken to at least six hospitals in the
western Tokyo area.
Such mass killings are extremely rare in Japan and typically involve
stabbings. Japan has strict gun laws and possession of firearms by
the public is rare.
Eight children were stabbed to death at their school in Osaka by a
former janitor in 2001. Seven people died 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.
A revision to Japan's Swords and Firearms Control Law was introduced
in 2009 in the wake of that attack, banning the possession of
double-edged knives and further tightening gun-ownership rules.
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 Kaori Kaneko, Minami Funakoshi, Linda Sieg,
Chang-Ran Kim, Olivier Fabre and William Mallard in TOKYO, Eric
Beech in WASHINGTON and Jon Herskovitz in AUSTIN; Writing by Raju
Gopalakrishnan; Editing by Sandra Maler, Grant McCool and Paul Tait)
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