Letter foretold Japan rampage that killed 19 disabled people

SAGAMIHARA, Japan — The suspect in a mass stabbing attack that left 19 people dead at a facility for the mentally disabled in Japan was transferred today from a local police station to the prosecutor’s office in Yokohama.

His head and shoulders covered with a blue jacket, 26-year-old Satoshi Uematsu was led out of a police station in Sagamihara city and into the back of an unmarked white van with emergency lights on top. Photographers swarmed the van as it pulled away.

Uematsu had been held at the police station all day and overnight after turning himself in about two hours after Tuesday’s pre-dawn attack. He had earlier delivered a letter to Parliament outlining the bloody plan and saying all disabled people should be put to death.

Kanagawa prefectural authorities said Uematsu had left dead or injured nearly a third of the almost 150 patients at the facility in a matter of 40 minutes. It is Japan’s deadliest mass killing in decades. The fire department said 25 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, 30 miles west of Tokyo. The man broke in by shattering a window at 2:10 a.m., according to a health official, and then set about slashing the patients’ throats.

Sagamihara fire department official Kunio Takano said the attacker killed 10 women and nine men. The youngest was 19, the oldest 70.

All those killed were patients.

In February, Uematsu tried to hand deliver a letter to Parliament’s lower house speaker that revealed his turmoil. It demanded that all disabled people be put to death through “a world that allows for mercy killing,” Kyodo news agency and TBS TV reported. The Parliament confirmed the letter.

Uematsu boasted in the letter that he had the ability to kill 470 disabled people in what he called was “a revolution,” and outlined an attack on two facilities, after which he said he will turn himself in.