Japanese police arrest man for ploughing his car into children

The seven children, who had been on their way home from school, were injured and rushed to hospital but all remained conscious

Japanese police arrested a man after they said he ploughed his car deliberately into seven primary school children in the western city of Osaka on Thursday.

The children, who had been on their way home from school, were injured and rushed to hospital but all seven remained conscious.

An Osaka police official, who declined to be identified, said the driver was a 28-year-old man who lives in Tokyo and gave AFP an account of what he said after his arrest.

“I was fed up with everything, so I decided to kill people by ramming the car I was driving into several elementary school children,” the official quoted the man as saying.

Police are holding him on suspicion of attempted murder, the official said.

The children are aged seven and eight and police said the most serious injury was a fractured jaw suffered by a seven-year-old girl.

The other six, all boys, appeared to have suffered comparatively milder injuries that included bruises and scratches and they were under examination, police said.

The car was “zigzagging” as it hit the children, with one girl “covered in blood and other kids suffering what appeared to be scratches”, a witness told Nippon TV.

The driver was wearing a surgical mask and “looked like he was in shock” after he was dragged out of the car by schoolteachers, Nippon TV quoted a witness as saying.

Violent crime is relatively rare in Japan but shocking incidents do sometimes occur.

In 2008, Tomohiro Kato rammed a rented truck into a crowd of pedestrians in Tokyo’s Akihabara district, before getting out and going on a stabbing spree in an attack that killed seven people.

“I came to Akihabara to kill people. It didn’t matter who I’d kill,” he told police at the time.

Kato was sentenced to death and hanged in 2022.

Japan and the United States are the only two members of the Group of Seven industrialised economies to retain the death penalty, and there is overwhelming public support for the practice.

Before the 2008 attack, Kato complained online of his unstable job and his loneliness.

Prosecutors said his self-confidence had plummeted after a woman he chatted with online abruptly stopped emailing him when he sent her a photograph of himself.