A Japanese man was sentenced to death on Monday for killing 19 persons with disabilities in a knife-wielding rampage in 2016 that was one of post-war Japan’s worst mass killings, reports Reuters.
Satoshi Uematsu, 30, had admitted to stabbing to death or injuring the victims at a care centre for people with mental disabilities where he had once worked in the city of Sagamihara,southwest of Tokyo in July 2016.
Twenty-six others were wounded. Many of the victims were stabbed as they slept.
He is accused of using a hammer to break into the building, before tying up a worker, stealing their keys and going from room to room to stab his victims in the necks as they slept in the early hours of 26 July. Uematsu, who used to work at the facility, turned himself into a local police station a few hours after the incident and goes on trial on 8 January.
The case has attracted enormous media attention in Japan and rest of the world since March 2017.
