Japanese man sentenced to death for stabbing spree

OSAKA — A Japanese court sentenced a former auto plant worker to death Thursday for driving a truck into a crowd of pedestrians before stabbing passers-by at random in an attack that left seven people dead.Tomohiro Kato, 28, told the Tokyo District Court he was "fully responsible" for the bloody knife attack in one of the city's most popular shopping districts almost three years ago in which he also wounded 10 others.Kato was arrested shortly after the attack, in which he rammed a two-tonne rental truck into a crowd of Sunday shoppers in the neon-lit Akihabara electronics district before stabbing people with a double-edged knife."The defendant used a knife to attack those who just happened to be there and took the lives of many people who were completely innocent," said presiding judge Hiroaki Murayama, according to broadcaster NHK and news agencies."It was a brutal crime that did not indicate a shred of humanity on the part of the defendant. I have no choice but to sentence him to death."Kato, dressed in a black suit and white shirt, was motionless as he listened to the sentence being handed down. Japan is the only major industrialised democracy apart from the United States to execute criminals, usually for cases of multiple murder, and now has more than one hundred convicts on death row.The Tokyo District Prosecutors Office issued a terse one-line statement: "We think the facts admitted in the case and the punishment are appropriate."The deadly noon-time rampage shocked Japan, which has a low violent crime rate, while throwing the spotlight on the online bullying that led up to the attacks in Akihabara, a centre for the manga comic and anime film subculture.In one of the court hearings, Kato said he went on the killing spree on June 8, 2008, because he had been the target of online bullying."I wanted people to know that I seriously wanted to stop the harassment on the Internet bulletin board that I used," he said, according to Japanese media.Japan had not seen such a deadly attack since seven years earl

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