June 9 (Bloomberg) -- A man went on a stabbing rampage yesterday in Tokyo's downtown Akihabara district, killing seven people and injuring 10, Japanese news reports said.Tomohiro Kato, 25, drove into a crowd of pedestrians on the closed-off main avenue of the Akihabara electronics district about 12:30 p.m., Jiro Akaogi, a spokesman at the Metropolitan Police Department, told Bloomberg News yesterday. Kato left the vehicle and began knifing people, he said.
One of the dead was a 21-year-old woman, Kyodo News Service said. The other six were men aged between 19 and 74 years, the newswire said.
``I came to Akihabara to kill people,'' Kato told police after his arrest, according to Kyodo. ``I am tired of the world. Anyone was OK.''
The Akihabara attack echoes one in March, when a 24-year- old man wanted for murder killed one person and injured seven in a stabbing spree at a shopping mall northeast of Tokyo.
Japan had 1.1 homicides per 100,000 people compared with 3.5 in France, 3.2 in the U.K. and 5.6 in the U.S., according to Japanese government figures published last year. Japan's prison population rose 45 percent to 69,301 in the six years to 2006.
Eight elementary schoolchildren were slashed to death at a school near Osaka on June 8, 2001, by Mamoru Takuma, 37, who was on medication for a mental problem. Takuma, who told police he took 10 times the normal dose of his drug, had been arrested two years earlier for drugging four teachers at a different school where he worked.
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