TOKYO: A man was arrested in the Japanese city of Osaka after allegedly ploughing his car deliberately into seven schoolchildren on Thursday, local media said.

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

Police could not immediately confirm the reports to AFP.

The driver was a 28-year-old man who lives in Tokyo and Osaka police have held him on suspicion of attempted murder, the reports said, citing unidentified investigative sources.

NHK said the man admitted the charges to police and stated that he was “fed up with everything, so he rammed the car into them thinking to kill someone”.

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 man was wearing a surgical mask and “looked like he was in shock” after he was dragged out by school teachers, Nippon TV quoted a witness as saying.

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

In 2008, Tomohiro Kato rammed a rented two-tonne 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 later 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.

Prior to 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.

AFP