A suspect behind a stabbing spree in Tokyo which left seven dead was handed to prosecutors on Tuesday as a picture emerged of an angry young man engulfed by feelings he was ugly and lonely.
As dozens of camera crews swarmed around, 25-year-old suspect Tomohiro Kato stared glumly at the floor inside a police van as he was taken to prosecutors, who will interrogate him and could press charges that carry the death penalty. In Japan's deadliest crime in seven years, Kato drove a rented two-tonne truck Sunday into Akihabara, a crowded Tokyo district which is the hub of Japan's comic-book and video-game subculture.
He swerved the vehicle into pedestrians, jumped out and ran into the crowds raising a survival knife in one hand and a smaller knife in the other, wounding 17 people before he was overpowered. Four died from stab wounds and three others were killed by the truck.
Police issued a pubilc health alert on Tuesday, saying one of the wounded had hepatitis B. It urged anyone who had contact with the pools of blood on the street to come in for a health check for the potentially deadly disease. Kato told police that he was mentally ill and prosecutors planned mental examinations to decide if he can be held accountable for the crime, the Yomiuri Shimbun evening paper said. A police spokesman declined comment on the report but said Kato was "responding calmly" to questioning.
"Occasionally, he's in tears," he said. Kato documented his anger in hundreds of online postings, some made by mobile telephone as he drove to Tokyo. "I don't have a single friend and I won't in the future. I'll be ignored because I'm ugly," he wrote in one message in May. "If I had a girlfriend, I wouldn't have just left my job or be addicted to my cell phone. A man with hope could never understand this," he wrote.
"I'm lower than trash because at least the trash gets recycled," he also wrote. The Japanese cabinet discussed whether authorities could have done more considering the warning signs on the Internet, chief government spokesman Nobutaka Machimura said.
"There were various opinions but we haven't found a good answer yet," Machimura said. "It's not such a simple case." In the course of a few years, Kato went from studying at a top high school to struggling to hold on to his job at a small-town auto parts factory.
"He was an excellent student who was making efforts in studying and sports," a woman whose daughter was his classmate in elementary and middle schools told the Tokyo Shimbun. "His mother was eager about education and he seemed to be trying to live up to her expectations," she said. He was a leader in the classroom and of a tennis club in middle school, reports said. But he also started to act violently at home as he entered Aomori prefecture's top high school.
Entering the prestigious school as an elite, his class rank slipped to around 300 among the 360 students as he rubbed shoulders with the region's brightest children, a classmate told the Asahi television network. "He wasn't outstanding at all in his studies or extracurricular activities. He was really a mediocre student," a high school teacher told the Fuji network. A neighbour said she heard that Kato and his younger brother would beat up their own mother.
"It's so painful having dinner with him," another acquaintance quoted the mother as saying, according to the Sports Hochi tabloid. "I'm scared." He failed university entrance examinations and eventually trained to become an auto mechanic, newspapers said. A temping agency dispatched him in November to the auto parts factory in central Shizuoka prefecture, but he was reportedly on the verge of losing his job.
Comments
Comments are closed.