SAGAMIHARA, Japan—A young Japanese man went on a stabbing rampage Tuesday at a facility for the mentally disabled where he had been fired, police 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, Satoshi Uematsu, 26, 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, the deadliest mass killing in Japan in decades, authorities said. Twenty-five 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, 50 kilometers (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.
Details of how he did that, and if the victims were asleep or otherwise helpless, were not immediately known, although a letter he sent to Japan’s Parliament in February gave a peek into Uematsu’s dark turmoil.
