JAPAN:SEVEN PEOPLE were killed and 10 injured in downtown Tokyo yesterday by a "hysterical" man who ploughed a van into a crowd of shoppers and began slashing people with a hunting knife.
The man, identified by police as Tomohiro Kato (25), mowed down three people at a busy intersection of Akihabara, a popular shopping and entertainment district, before leaping from his rented van and stabbing at least another 15 victims.
Witnesses said Kato was screaming hysterically during his five-minute rampage.
"It was chaos," one man told state broadcaster NHK.
"He was just stabbing people at random as he walked toward Akihabara station."
Another woman said: "I can't speak any more, I'm shaking so badly."
Others said Kato jumped on top of one of his victims and stabbed him "many times" before moving down a crowded main street.
The victims include a secondary school student, a policeman stabbed in the back as he came to someone's aid, and Katsuhiro Nakamura (74), whose wife said he had gone to buy a computer game. "He was in such a good mood before he left."
A spokesman for the Tokyo police told the Japanese media last night that Kato had come to Akihabara, which was packed with weekend shoppers, to kill people, and didn't care who.
"He said he was tired of life. He said he was sick of everything," said Jiro Akaogi.
Photographs taken with mobile-phone cameras showed police wrestling the bespectacled and bloodied Kato to the ground, after they threatened to shoot him. Umbrellas, shoes and bloody towels littered the area after the attack.
It is the latest and deadliest in a string of terrifying indiscriminate attacks in Japan, 67 in the last decade, and increasing in tempo since the start of this year.
Most of the assaults involve knife-wielding loners - guns are still rare in Japan.
In January, a16-year-old boy carrying a pair of kitchen knives slashed his way through a crowded Tokyo street, badly injuring two.
"I wanted to kill everybody. I did not care who they were," he told police afterwards.
In March, Masahiro Kanagawa (24) went on a stabbing spree in a rural train station that left one person dead and seven wounded. Kanagawa said he wanted to kill his sister but couldn't find her.
The same month, civil servant Kuniaki Kariya was pushed in front a speeding train by a young man who also said he "didn't care" whom he killed.
"If you look at the profile of the men, they are often men in part-time or insecure work," said Kaori Katada, a sociologist at Tokyo Metropolitan University, which says the disintegration of Japan's traditional employment system and the growing isolation of millions of city dwellers are partly to blame.
"These men feel excluded from society and they explode in pent- up rage, with terrible consequences for people around them."