A woman repeatedly stabbed two of her daughter's kindergarten classmates with a sashimi knife yesterday, leaving them to die on a remote country road in the ricefields of western Japan, police said.
The 34-year-old Chinese woman, who was supposed to drive the two five-year-olds to school with her own child, slashed the classmates around a dozen times each with the 20cm thin fish-cutting blade.
"I took a sashimi knife and stabbed them in the car," Zheng Yongshan, who also goes by the Japanese name Mie Taniguchi, was quoted as saying by police.
She slashed the boy and girl in the stomach and back and tossed them out near ricefields in the town of Nagahama in Shiga Prefecture, 300km southwest of Tokyo, police said.
"She has not yet talked about what motivated her to kill the children," a police officer said.
But a neighbor recalled that Taniguchi, who came to Japan five years ago and moved to the area in 2004, would complain she could not get along with the mothers of her daughter's classmates, Jiji Press reported.
A passer-by discovered the bloodied body of the girl, Wakana Taketomo, on a small road running through the farmland.
The boy, Jin Sano, was recovered lying in a small irrigation stream, police said.
Taniguchi, who is married to a Japanese, would take turns with other parents driving the children to school and it was her turn yesterday morning, police said.
After the killing, police found Taniguchi and her own child in a parked car 56km away from the crime site. She had a knife with blood on it, police said.
Taketomo was declared dead at 9:45 am, shortly after she was taken to hospital, and Sano died there at around noon.
The girl was stabbed 19 times and the boy 13 times, Kyodo News reported.
The children's red and pink schoolbags were dumped away from their bodies in the town of Nagahama, TV footage showed.
Japan has one of the world's lowest crime rates but has recently witnessed a series of grisly attacks on children.
In one of the most gruesome cases, former psychiatric patient Mamoru Takuma killed eight students with a butcher knife at a school in Osaka in 2001.
Takuma was executed in September 2004.
According to the National Police Agency, 94 children up to age 12 were murdered or threatened with murder from January to November last year.
In December the stabbed and naked body of a seven-year-old girl was found in Ibaraki Prefecture east of Tokyo, just 10 days after a girl the same age was strangled in the western city of Hiroshima.
DEBT BREAK: Friedrich Merz has vowed to do ‘whatever it takes’ to free up more money for defense and infrastructure at a time of growing geopolitical uncertainty Germany’s likely next leader Friedrich Merz was set yesterday to defend his unprecedented plans to massively ramp up defense and infrastructure spending in the Bundestag as lawmakers begin debating the proposals. Merz unveiled the plans last week, vowing his center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU)/Christian Social Union (CSU) bloc and the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD) — in talks to form a coalition after last month’s elections — would quickly push them through before the end of the current legislature. Fraying Europe-US ties under US President Donald Trump have fueled calls for Germany, long dependent on the US security umbrella, to quickly
RARE EVENT: While some cultures have a negative view of eclipses, others see them as a chance to show how people can work together, a scientist said Stargazers across a swathe of the world marveled at a dramatic red “Blood Moon” during a rare total lunar eclipse in the early hours of yesterday morning. The celestial spectacle was visible in the Americas and Pacific and Atlantic oceans, as well as in the westernmost parts of Europe and Africa. The phenomenon happens when the sun, Earth and moon line up, causing our planet to cast a giant shadow across its satellite. But as the Earth’s shadow crept across the moon, it did not entirely blot out its white glow — instead the moon glowed a reddish color. This is because the
Romania’s electoral commission on Saturday excluded a second far-right hopeful, Diana Sosoaca, from May’s presidential election, amid rising tension in the run-up to the May rerun of the poll. Earlier this month, Romania’s Central Electoral Bureau barred Calin Georgescu, an independent who was polling at about 40 percent ahead of the rerun election. Georgescu, a fierce EU and NATO critic, shot to prominence in November last year when he unexpectedly topped a first round of presidential voting. However, Romania’s constitutional court annulled the election after claims of Russian interference and a “massive” social media promotion in his favor. On Saturday, an electoral commission statement
Chinese authorities increased pressure on CK Hutchison Holdings Ltd over its plan to sell its Panama ports stake by sharing a second newspaper commentary attacking the deal. The Hong Kong and Macau Affairs Office on Saturday reposted a commentary originally published in Ta Kung Pao, saying the planned sale of the ports by the Hong Kong company had triggered deep concerns among Chinese people and questioned whether the deal was harming China and aiding evil. “Why were so many important ports transferred to ill-intentioned US forces so easily? What kind of political calculations are hidden in the so-called commercial behavior on the
RSS