On Monday morning, a man was detained under suspicion of trying to set fire to the bullet train in Kyushu, Japan. It seemed like the culprit wanted to replicate the arson attempted in the Tokyo train during Halloween.
The 69-year-old man, Kiyoshi Miyake, a resident of Fukuoka, was detained on the spot. There were no reports of injuries on the train which was leaving Hiroshima and heading for Kagoshima Chuo Station. The train was operating within the Kumamoto Prefecture at the time of the incident at around 8:40 a.m., according to the Kyushu Railway Co, known as JR Kyushu.
Miyake was reported to have told the prefectural police that he “wanted to imitate” the recent arson and knife attack on the train in Tokyo after hearing the news coverage about it.
On Oct 31, the man was wearing a costume similar to the Villain Joker. He then wounded 17 victims, one of them critically stabbed to unconsciousness, in an attack on the Keio Line train. The person in question is Kyota Hattori, who admitted to investigators that he is a fan of Joker and was planning to murder people and get sentenced to death.
In today’s case, Miyake said he spread the liquid, ignited the paper with and then threw it over the floor, according to police. The driver said that smoke was visible inside the No. 3 car, which had about 30 people. When the emergency alarm sounded, the train was forced to make the emergency stop.
After transferring passengers from the No. 3 car onto another and arriving at its final destination around 10:25 a.m, certain Shinkansen services were temporarily suspended, leading to delays of up to 50 mins and impacting around the 900 passengers.
A variety of assaults on stations and trains in the Tokyo region have been reported in recent times. In August, a man stabbed ten people in the Odakyu Electric Railway commuter train in the Setagaya Ward.
In the most tragic incident ever on a bullet train, an unidentified man set himself on fire on a shinkansen train in June 2015 and killed a woman near him who was in her 50s. There were 26 other people wounded, with two who were seriously injured, out of more than 800 who were on the train.
Also read about 17 Injured After A Japanese Man Dressed As Joker Sets Train on Fire