An assailant in Japan has stabbed to death a police officer and reportedly killed another person after grabbing the policeman’s gun and fleeing the scene.
The incident took place in the country’s central Toyama Prefecture on Tuesday, when the assailant stabbed the officer at a police station with what appeared to be a knife before grabbing his pistol and running away, said a police spokesman.
“But police caught the man afterwards,” the spokesman further told AFP.
Japan’s Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga confirmed the death of two people in the violent incident but failed to identify the second victim.
However, local press reports said the assailant also shot and wounded a 69-year-old security guard with the weapon taken from the fatally-stabbed officer.
The assailant himself was also injured while being caught.
The identity and motive of the attacker were not immediately known.
The incident came just over two weeks after another man was detained in central Japan for stabbing a person to death and injuring two others aboard a bullet train. Police arrested a 22-year-old, unemployed suspect for the stabbing, which took place aboard the shinkansen train travelling from the capital, Tokyo, to a station in Osaka.
In July 2016, a man armed with a knife killed 19 people and injured 25 others at a facility for disabled people in the Japanese city of Sagamihara in suburban Tokyo. Local news reports identified the 26-year-old attacker as a former employee of the facility.
Also in 2015, a Japanese man set himself ablaze aboard a moving bullet train, killing himself and a woman in an unprecedented incident.