A knife-wielding man stormed into an elementary school Friday morning in Ikeda, Osaka Prefecture, and fatally stabbed eight children and wounded 15 others before he was subdued, police said.
Mamoru Takuma, a 37-year-old psychiatric outpatient from Ikeda, ran amok inside Osaka Kyoiku University Ikeda Elementary School at around 10:15 a.m., stabbing 21 first- and second-graders and two teachers.
The eight dead — seven girls and one boy — were identified as Yuka Kiso, Kana Tsukamoto, Yuki Hongo, Ayano Moriwaki, Mayuko Isaka, Maki Sakai, Rena Yamashita — all second-graders — and Takahiro Totsuka, age 6. It is the second-largest murder incident of the past decade, eclipsed only by the 1995 nerve gas attack on the Tokyo subway system that claimed 12 lives.