NAGOYA (Kyodo) An elderly man stabbed himself in the abdomen Thursday in a restroom at the Nagoya Municipal Government office in Aichi Prefecture and then called out for the mayor as he bled from his wound, police said.
At around 11:20 a.m., a city employee in a third-floor restroom heard a man shouting, "Call the mayor here." The employee then noticed a man who appeared to be in his 60s or 70s sitting on a toilet and bleeding from the abdomen, police said.
After police arrived on the scene, the man refused to leave the stall and locked himself in, police said.
Police finally pulled the man from the stall about two hours later. Still conscious, the man was rushed to a hospital, said the police, who added it wasn't clear if the act was politically motivated.
Nagoya officials said the man is not a city employee. The restroom is outside the office of Mayor Takashi Kawamura, who won the mayoral race in April after serving as a Lower House member of the Democratic Party of Japan.
Kawamura was in a city assembly session at the time of the incident.
