An 11-year-old girl slashed a female classmate to death with a razor knife yesterday in a shocking attack in an elementary school in southern Japan, police said.
The lunchtime assault happened in a classroom in Sasebo, 980km southwest to Tokyo, an official with the Nagasaki Prefectural police said on condition of anonymity.
Police in Sasebo said the victim suffered wounds to the neck and arms. She was stabbed with a small knife with a retractable razor used to cut paper, police said.
Police identified the victim as Satomi Mitarai, 12. The name of the attacker was not released, in accordance with Japanese legal protections for juvenile offenders.
Mitarai's bleeding body was discovered in a third-floor classroom by a teacher who called police. Agents quickly apprehended the young suspect, who was being questioned.
Prefectural police said the suspect had confessed, though they did not yet have a motive. TV footage showed police guarding the school and inspecting the classroom where the attack apparently happened.
The killing was committed during lunchtime, which in Japan is taken in the classroom. The stabbing, however, happened in a class where children were not eating.
Also yesterday, a 38-year-old Japanese woman repeatedly stabbed her teenage daughter with a kitchen knife and then slit her own wrist following an argument over going to school, police said yesterday.
Kazumi Isonishi, 38, was found barely conscious in her bathroom in Moriguchi, some 400km west of Tokyo, early yesterday after her 16-year-old daughter called police.
After breaking into the house, police found the bloodied daughter lying near her bed with nine stab and slash wounds to her back and chest.
"The mother told the daughter to go to school, it developed into an argument and then she stabbed the daughter and tried to kill herself," a Moriguchi city police spokesman said.
Increasing violence in Japan's schools and among youth has been a rising concern in recent years.
Last July, a 12-year-old boy was accused of kidnapping, molesting and murdering a four-year-old in the southern city of Nagasaki.
In the same month, a 14-year-old boy was arrested for beating a 13-year-old classmate to death in Okinawa.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
Japan unveiled a plan on Thursday to evacuate around 120,000 residents and tourists from its southern islets near Taiwan within six days in the event of an “emergency”. The plan was put together as “the security situation surrounding our nation grows severe” and with an “emergency” in mind, the government’s crisis management office said. Exactly what that emergency might be was left unspecified in the plan but it envisages the evacuation of around 120,000 people in five Japanese islets close to Taiwan. China claims Taiwan as part of its territory and has stepped up military pressure in recent years, including
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
RSS