Kawasaki: Two people including a schoolgirl were stabbed to death and more than a dozen injured in Japan on Tues-day in a rampage that targeted children as they waited for a bus.
The attacker, a man in his 50s who has not yet been identified, crept silently up behind a group of children at the bus stop and slashed randomly at them before fatally stabbing himself in the neck.
Police said an 11-year-old schoolgirl named Han-ako Kuribayashi and a 39-year-old parent, identified as government official Satoshi Oyama, died in the attack, which shocked a country where violent crime is rare.
Seventeen more people, mainly young children, were injured, according to authorities who had earlier given the schoolgirl's age as 12. Koji Shimazu of the St. Marianna University School of Medicine, said that one woman in her 40s and three schoolgirls had to undergo surgery for knife wounds to the head and neck. “It is a very harrowing case. I feel strong anger,” Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said in televised remarks.
“I offer my heartfelt condolences to the victims and hope the injured recover quickly.” A local man living nearby, who identified himself as Matsumoto, 25, said he went outside after hearing screams.
“It’s hard to describe what it was like, how it sounded. It wasn’t girls having fun, it was a sound that was absolutely not normal,” he said.
“I saw a man lying on the street. I also saw a girl hunched over on the ground. There were also five or six girls, maybe they were the ones who screamed... There was blood all over them.”
The attack occurred during the busy early morning commute as workers headed to their offices and children to school. Fire department officials said they got the first emergency calls shortly before 8 am (2300 GMT) on Monday. The scene of the attack was still swarming with emergency personnel hours later, with three police vans parked around the spot to block it from view.
