LOC12:30
09:30 GMT
TOKYO, July 27 (KUNA) -- The suspect in Japan's worst mass killing in its postwar history used five different knives in Tuesday's stabbing rampage in a facility for the disabled near Tokyo, police said Wednesday.
Satoshi Uematsu, a 26-year-old former employee of the facility, broke into a residence for people with mental disabilities in Sagamihara City early Tuesday, stabbing to death at least 19 people and injuring 26 others.
The 19 victims were nine men and 10 women ranging in age from 19 to 70, all had severe disabilities.
Uematsu, who turned himself in at a police station in the city, about 50 km west of Tokyo, shortly after the stabbing rampage, was sent to the prosecutors' office on Wednesday.
The man carried three knives in a bag, with bloodstained on all of them, when he showed up at the police station. But two more bloodstained knives were found in the site, police said.
The man had been working for the facility between December 2012 and February this year. He is currently unemployed and lives near the facility.
Uematsu told police that he wanted all disabled people to disappear and that he stabbed people who could not communicate well.
According to the facility's official websites, the care home housed 149 people with disabilities aged between 18 and 75 as of the end of last month.
In mid-February, the man visited the Lower House Speaker's official residence in Tokyo to hand a hand-written letter to the speaker, in which he said, "I can kill 470 disabled people," according to police.
According to public broadcaster NHK, Tokyo police passed on this information the local police station, which is charge of the area where Uematsu lived.
Local authorities put Uematsu in a mental hospital after a consultation with a doctor, but the man was released in early March after it was diagnosed that his symptoms had improved.
The stabbing rampage is Japan's deadliest mass murder in decades. In 1995, members of a doomsday cult killed 12 and injured thousands in simultaneous attacks with sarin nerve gas on Tokyo's subway system. (end)
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