TOKYO: The 15-year-old girl who injured two women by stabbing them with a knife on a street in Tokyo’s Shibuya Ward on Saturday has said that she carried out the attack “as a rehearsal” to kill her mother and younger brother, investigative sources said Monday.

On Monday, Tokyo’s Metropolitan Police Department sent the junior high school third-grader, arrested at the site of the crime Saturday on suspicion of attempting to kill the two, a mother and her daughter, to public prosecutors.

Investigators are set to examine details of her motive for the knife attack, suspecting that she was looking for random targets.

The sources quoted the suspect as saying that she wanted to kill her own mother because she hates the fact that she is becoming like the parent, who she says tends to act out when frustrated.

As the reason for planning to kill her brother, the girl said that she thought it would be painful for him to see his mother’s dead body, according to the sources.

On Saturday, the suspect left her home in the city of Toda, Saitama Prefecture, north of Tokyo, after telling her family that she was going to cram school.

Around noon that day (3 a.m. GMT), she took a train at East Japan Railway Co.’s Musashi-Urawa Station in the city of Saitama, heading for the Shinjuku district in Tokyo.

After walking around to find a place without many pedestrians, she arrived in the Maruyama district in Shibuya, where she carried out the attack. 

The knives the suspect was carrying at the time, including the one she used in the assault, were brought from her home, according to the sources.

The MPD arrested the girl for allegedly trying to kill the two victims on a street in the district around 7:20 p.m. Saturday by stabbing them including in the back.

 The younger of the victims, aged 19, sustained a stab wound more than 10 centimeters deep.

JIJI Press