Fifteen people have been injured in a stabbing attack in a factory in central Japan, during which an unspecified liquid was also sprayed, officials said.<\/p>\n
“All fifteen people were sent to hospital,” a firefighting department official in the city of Mishima, southwest of Tokyo said.<\/p>\n
The official, declining to be named, said that of the 15 injuries, eight were the result of stabbing and seven due to the liquid.<\/p>\n
Some local media outlets, quoting unnamed sources, said the liquid appeared to be bleach.<\/p>\n
Five of the victims were classified as “requiring emergency care” by emergency workers at the scene, but all remained conscious, the official said.<\/p>\n
Tomoharu Sugiyama, another official from the firefighting department, said a call was received at about 4.30 pm (7.30am Irish time) from a nearby rubber factory saying “five or six people were stabbed by someone” and that a “spray-like liquid” had also been used.<\/p>\n
Japanese media, including public broadcaster NHK, reported that police had arrested a man on suspicion of attempted murder.<\/p>\n
The Asahi Shimbun daily quoted investigative sources as saying that the man in his 30s was someone connected to the factory.<\/p>\n
He was wearing what appeared to be a gas mask, the newspaper and other media said.<\/p>\n
Asahi also said that he was apparently armed with what it described as a survival knife.<\/p>\n
NHK said the man told police that he was 38 years old.<\/p>\n
The seriousness of the injuries was unknown, although NHK said all victims remained conscious.<\/p>\n
Sugiyama said at least six of the 14 victims had been sent to hospital in a fleet of ambulances.<\/p>\n
The factory in Mishima is run by Yokohama Rubber Company, whose business includes manufacturing tyres for trucks and buses, according to its corporate website.<\/p>\n
Violent crime is relatively rare in Japan, which has a low murder rate and some of the world’s toughest gun laws.<\/p>\n
However, there are occasional stabbing attacks and even shootings, including the assassination of former prime minister Shinzo Abe in 2022.<\/p>\n
A Japanese man was sentenced to death in October for a shooting and stabbing rampage that killed four people, including two police officers, in 2023.<\/p>\n
A 43-year-old man was also charged with attempted murder in May over a knife attack at Tokyo’s Toda-mae metro station.<\/p>\n
Japan remains shaken by the memory of a major subway attack in 1995 when members of the Aum Shinrikyo cult released sarin gas on trains, killing 14 people and making more than 5,800 ill.<\/p>\n
On 20 March 1995, five members of the Aum cult dropped bags of the Nazi-developed sarin nerve agent inside morning commuter trains, piercing the pouches with sharpened umbrella tips before fleeing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Fifteen people have been injured in a stabbing attack in a factory in central Japan, during which an…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":212078,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[42,43,40,38,41,39],"class_list":{"0":"post-212077","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-headlines","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-top-news","11":"tag-top-stories","12":"tag-topnews","13":"tag-topstories"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/212077","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=212077"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/212077\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/212078"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=212077"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=212077"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=212077"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}