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Man Stabs, Kills 7 in Tokyo Retail District (bigaltherealone)
Posted: 1:41:05 pm on 6/8/2008 Modified: Never
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Courtesy of washingtonpost.com
Screaming as he randomly stabbed shoppers with a hunting knife, a 25-year-old man killed seven people and injured 11 others at lunchtime Sunday in a Tokyo retail district.
Tomohiro Kato drove a white two-ton rental truck into a crowd of pedestrians, running over at least three people and then emerging from the truck with a large knife, according to police and witnesses.
Indiscriminately slashing and stabbing as he went, Kato then ran and walked through the center of the Akihabara neighborhood, where thousands of young men from Japan and around the world gather for electronic gadgets and comic books, computer games and nerdy fellowship.
"I am tired of life," Kato later told police. "I came to Akihabara to kill people. It didn't matter who they were. I came alone."
Japan is one of the safest countries in the world, when it comes to violent crime. Strict gun-control laws make it difficult for most Japanese to own handguns.
But this year, two previous stabbing attacks in crowded shopping districts left a total of 10 people injured and one dead. Sunday's rampage occurred on the seventh anniversary of an infamous stabbing incident near Osaka, where a man killed eight children and injured 15 others. He was later executed.
Akihabara, a neon-lighted temple for high-tech consumerism and for magazines and comics that cater to adolescent fantasies, looked liked a war zone on Sunday afternoon, with puddles of blood and random shoes on the pavement.
There was a frenzy of lights, sirens and ambulances, as paramedics scooped up the wounded and sped them away to hospitals.
As always on Sundays, the main street in Akihabara was closed to traffic. When Kato barreled into the street in his rental truck, it was crowded with pedestrians. Kato quickly got out of the truck with the knife and headed directly for one of the people he had run over, witnesses told reporters.
Kato "jumped on top of a man he had hit with his vehicle and stabbed him with a knife many times," one man told the Kyodo news agency.
Six of the seven killed were men, police said. They ranged in age from 19 to 74, but most were under 35. A 21-year-old woman was also killed.
Kato, wearing a white jacket and a black T-shirt, screamed and grunted as he stabbed people and was described by some witnesses as appearing to be mentally disturbed. He lives alone in a studio apartment in Susono City, near Mount Fuji southwest of Tokyo, according to the NHK, the national broadcaster.
Continued
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