A man, who has been arrested on suspicion of attempted murder for ramming a minicar into eight pedestrians on Takeshita-dori street in Shibuya Ward, Tokyo, on early Tuesday, tried spraying kerosene with a high-pressure washer near Meiji Jingu shrine about one hour before ramming the pedestrians, according to investigative sources.
The suspect, Kazuhiro Kusakabe, 21, was quoted by police as saying that he "would make a flamethrower and burn people [with it]." The Metropolitan Police Department believes that he initially planned to indiscriminately target and kill worshippers at the shrine on New Year's Day.
Kusakabe left Neyagawa, Osaka Prefecture, on the morning of Dec. 31 after loading a plastic tank filled with kerosene and a high-pressure washer into a rental car, the sources said. He then drove to Tokyo through the Tomei Expressway and arrived near the shrine after noon on the day. Afterwards, he stayed until late at night in the car parked on a road near the shrine.
According to the sources, Kusakabe told police that he "would set a fire after the number of worshippers increased."
When he tried to pump kerosene from the tank and spray it with the washer in the parked car after 11 p.m. on Dec. 31, he could not spray the kerosene as wide as he had expected, and part of the kerosene landed on him, the sources said.
A device to ignite the kerosene was attached to the tip of the nozzle of the washer with adhesive tape. He remodeled the equipment into a system to ignite kerosene pumped from the tank.
Kusakabe then tried to slam his car into the shrine, but could not enter the grounds of the shrine due to traffic regulations. For this reason, he drove his car into nearby Takeshita-dori and rammed the pedestrians one after another after 12:10 a.m. on Tuesday.
When he was placed under police custody, Kusakabe told police that if he could run away from the ramming incident, he would have committed a terrorist act in Ueno, Tokyo, the sources said. He told also police after his arrest that he would also have done the same thing in Osaka Prefecture.
Kusakabe, from Osaka Prefecture, attended a special foreign language school in Shinjuku Ward, Tokyo, after graduating from high school, while living alone in Chiba Prefecture. He later dropped out of the language school and attended a private university in the Kansai region from April 2018, according to the sources.
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