HATRED appears to be what fueled a young Japanese man who went on a stabbing rampage, killing 19 people yesterday at a facility for the mentally disabled where he had been fired. Months earlier, he reportedly gave a letter to the Japanese Parliament outlining the bloody plan.

    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 yesterday attack, the deadliest mass killing in Japan in decades. Twenty-five were wounded, 20 of them seriously.

    He drove up in a black car, carrying several knives to the Tsukui Yamayuri-en facility in Sagamihara, 50 kilometers west of Tokyo, according to security camera footage played on TV news programs. He 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.

    He calmly turned himself in about two hours after the attack, police said.

    Tsukui Yamayuri-en, which means mountain lily garden, was a facility Uematsu knew well, having worked there since 2012 until he was let go in February.

    In February, he tried to deliver a letter he wrote to the Parliament’s lower house speaker demanding all disabled people be put to death through “a world that allows for mercy killing,” Kyodo news agency and TBS TV reported.

    Uematsu boasted in the letter that he had the ability to kill 470 disabled people in what he called “a revolution,” and outlined an attack on two facilities, after which he said he will turn himself in. He also asked he be judged innocent on grounds of insanity, be given 500 million yen (US$5 million) in aid and plastic surgery so he could lead a normal life afterward.

    Mass killings are rare in Japan. Because of the country’s extremely strict gun-control laws, any attacker usually resorts to stabbings. (SD-Agencies)