A person believed to have a gun was holed up in a put up workplace in a Tokyo suburb on Tuesday and holding an unidentified variety of hostages, in an episode that was unsettling in Japan, the place gun violence is extraordinarily uncommon.
An worker contained in the put up workplace in Warabi metropolis referred to as the police at round 2:15 p.m., saying there was a gunman inside, in response to Taira Masuda, a spokesman for the police headquarters in Saitama Prefecture, who declined to say what number of hostages had been being held.
That report, Mr. Masuda stated, took place an hour after two males, one in his 40s and one in his 60s, had been shot at a close-by hospital, in Toda metropolis. Another official, the mayor of Toda, stated on social media {that a} man had fired a handgun at Todachuo General Hospital and fled on a motorbike.
Students and college at a dozen elementary faculties and 6 center faculties in Toda went into lockdown, in response to a spokesperson for the Toda City Board of Education.
Mayor Fumihito Sugawara, in an announcement on X, the platform previously generally known as Twitter, described the suspect as between 40 and 50 years previous, about 5 ft 3 inches tall, with a medium construct and holding “what appeared to be a handgun.”
The put up workplace the place the suspect was holding hostages was lower than a mile from the hospital in Toda. The two males shot on the hospital had non-life-threatening accidents, in response to NHK, a public broadcaster.
A hospital spokesman referred inquiries to the police.
Japan has a few of the hardest legal guidelines for getting firearms in the world, and deadly shootings are extraordinarily uncommon. Last yr, Shinzo Abe, the previous prime minister, was assassinated by a gunman throughout a political marketing campaign speech. It was one in every of solely 4 deaths by a firearm in all of 2022.
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