After 8-hour standoff near Tokyo, hostages are free and suspect is held

Asia
By Editor_1
An aerial photo showing first responders take position outside the post office where an armed man holed up in a post office in a Tokyo suburb and took two hostages on Tuesday (October 31, 2023) – Kyodo News via AP
By Motoko Rich and Hikari Hida

TOKYO — Police in Japan arrested a suspect Tuesday (31) night after an armed man holed up in a post office in a Tokyo suburb and took two hostages, prompting a nearly eight-hour standoff that was an unsettling episode for a country where gun violence is extremely rare.

The suspect had released one hostage earlier Tuesday. Three hours later, after a second hostage ran out of the building, the police stormed the premises and arrested an 86-year-old suspect, according to NHK, a public broadcaster.

Police were first notified of the situation when an employee inside the post office in Warabi city called authorities at 2:15 p.m. to say there was a gunman inside, according to Taira Masuda, a spokesperson for the police headquarters in Saitama prefecture. The hostages were two female postal workers in their 20s and 30s, police said, and negotiators communicated with the suspect by telephone throughout the evening.

Around 7:15 p.m., NHK showed footage of a woman in her 20s walking out of the post office without injury. Two hours later, the second hostage, a woman in her 30s and also a postal worker, apparently escaped from the building. Police stormed the post office just after 10:00 p.m. and arrested the suspect, according to NHK. The broadcaster named the suspect as Tsuneo Suzuki.

The initial call about the hostage-taking at the post office came about an hour after two men were shot less than a mile away at a hospital in Toda city, according to Masuda.

Students and faculty at a dozen elementary schools and six middle schools in Toda went into lockdown Tuesday afternoon, according to a spokesperson for the City Board of Education.

The two men shot at the hospital, a doctor and a patient, had non-life-threatening injuries, according to NHK. A hospital spokesperson referred inquiries to the police.

Japan has some of the toughest laws for buying firearms in the world, and fatal shootings are extremely rare. Last year, Shinzo Abe, the former prime minister, was assassinated by a gunman during a political campaign speech. It was one of only four deaths by a firearm in all of 2022.

-New York Times

 

 

Editor_1
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