A kindergarten teacher who claimed Tuesday that she was stabbed by an unidentified woman has admitted that she inflicted the cuts herself, according to investigators. Police looking into the case said the 23-year-old female teacher at Takachiho Kindergarten in Tokyo's Suginami Ward said she made up the story because she had not completed a report regarding her pupils that had to be submitted to her superiors the previous day.
"(The lie) was a spur-of-the-moment act to hide my own mistake, and now I am full of regret," police on Friday quoted the woman as saying. Investigators were treating the case as a possible violation of the Minor Offense Law, and would study whether to send the case to prosecutors. On Tuesday, the teacher said a woman who appeared to be around 50 years old approached the kindergarten's side entrance at around 8:15 a.m. and cut her arm with a knife through the steel bars as she tried to hand the teacher a package. No pupils were around at the time.
The teacher had claimed that the woman, who was carrying a walking stick and wearing a dress, fled the scene.
Police had continued to question the teacher because they found almost no reports of a woman by that description in the area and because their investigation of the scene of attack did not match the teacher's description of events.
On Friday, she admitted to police that she made the story up, and used a knife in the kindergarten kitchen to cut her arm. It became hard for her to come out with the truth as the case gained so much attention, according to investigators.
The incident caused much alarm as it followed a stabbing spree in Osaka earlier this month.