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Man arrested after stabbing rampage in Japan
Thirteen people, mostly schoolchildren, have been stabbed aboard two buses outside a train station north of Tokyo, with one 16-year-old girl sustaining serious injuries.
The man told police he was unemployed
By Julian Ryall in Tokyo 4:03AM GMT 17 Dec 2010
Police arrested a man identified at Yuta Saito, 27, at the scene on suspicion of attempted murder. Saito told police that he is unemployed but no further details have been released. No reason has been given for the attacks, which occurred at around 9 am
Of the 13 people injured, 11 were students at schools close to Toride Station, in Ibaraki Prefecture 25 miles northeast of central Tokyo.
National broadcaster NHK showed news footage from the scene of the stabbings, with police inspecting the abandoned buses in a parking bay for the station.
A witness said he heard screaming and a man's voice coming from one of the buses. The incident is the most serious in Japan since seven random people were killed by Tomohiro Kato in the Akihabara district of Tokyo in June 2008.
Kato, 25, drove a rented truck into a crowd of people in a pedestrianised area, killing three people, before leaping out and attacking passersby with a knife. He killed a further four people and injured another eight before he was subdued by police.
During questioning, Kato told police that he had been driven to act because he did not have a girlfriend, he was ugly, addicted to his mobile phone, had problems at work and was "lower than trash because at least rubbish gets recycled."
That attack was explained in the Japanese media as a result of the growing alienation of Japanese youth and their inability to deal with the stresses of everyday life.
According to the National Police Agency, an average of seven such attacks occur each year in Japan, although there was a sudden upsurge in arrests after the Akihabara incident due to individuals threatening copycat killings elsewhere in the country.
In just two weeks, 12 people were arrested for threatening to carry out knife attacks and police across Japan will be on alert for similar attacks in the wake of the Ibaraki stabbings.
