Japanese police raid house of knife attack suspect

EghtesadOnline: Japanese police on Wednesday raided the house of a 26-year-old man suspected of stabbing to death 19 people and wounding dozens at a facility for the disabled in a small town near Tokyo, Japan's worst mass killing in decades.

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27 July 2016

About half a dozen plainclothes police entered the home of Satoshi Uematsu, a former employee of the facility, as reporters and television cameras stood by, reports Reuters.

Uematsu was earlier sent from a regional jail in Sagamihara town, about 45 km (25 miles) southwest of Tokyo, to the Yokohama District Public Prosecutors Office in Kanagawa prefecture.

Video footage showed him smiling in a police car as he was driven away.

Uematsu, who gave himself up to police on Tuesday after the attack, had said in letters he wrote in February that he could "obliterate 470 disabled people" and gave detailed plans of how he would do so, the Kyodo news agency reported.

He was involuntarily committed to hospital after he expressed a "willingness to kill severely disabled people", an official in Sagamihara told Reuters.

He was freed on March 2 after a doctor deemed he had improved and was no longer a threat to himself or others, the official said.

The affair has shocked a country with one of the lowest crime rates in the world.