‘I told him, “I’ll take care of you”‘… Fired Ethiopian national ‘knifed his former boss’ and stated, “I’m running out of patience.”

Three hours after the incident, police officers were still coming and going, and the area around the scene was filled with a tense atmosphere.

It seems that someone was stabbed. I didn’t know there was such a violent incident in the middle of Tokyo. ……

A woman in her 40s who was standing nearby said in a frightened tone, “I don’t know what to do. On the evening of September 12, the reporter visited a downtown area with many restaurants in Akasaka (Minato-ku), Tokyo. It was around 5:30 in the evening when a man in his 30s was stabbed with a knife inside a building in the same area.

The suspect, Gebremariam Mesfin Mularet, 61, an Ethiopian national, was caught red-handed on suspicion of attempted murder in the building where the incident took place. Gebremariam allegedly stabbed Mr. A, a male executive in his 30s at an apparel-related company whose office is on the third floor of the building, in the stomach with a kitchen knife with a blade of approximately 25 cm in length.

When police officers arrived at the scene after receiving a 110 call that an employee had been stabbed, they found a kitchen knife near the Gebremariam suspect with blood all over it. Mr. A, who was stabbed, was immediately rushed to the hospital, but he was in a critical condition, unconscious (he later regained consciousness). Another male employee, who tried to take the knife from Gebremariam, suffered a minor cut on his finger.

Feeling betrayed

Gebremariam was a former bartender at a bar owned by the company for which Mr. A works, and was fired about a year ago when the company pulled out of the business. When questioned by the police, Gebremariam gave the following statement regarding his motive for committing the crime: “I felt betrayed after being fired.

I felt betrayed when I was fired. (Mr. A) said, ‘I will take care of your next job,’ but he didn’t introduce me (to a job). I consulted with him several times, but the situation did not change, so I ran out of patience. （I was going to threaten him if anything happened (with the knife he was carrying). I was so excited that I don’t remember what happened at the time of the incident.”

Former Kanagawa Prefectural Police detective and crime journalist Taihei Ogawa explains.

From Mr. A’s point of view, his statement, ‘I will take care of you at work,’ was probably a vague social order out of kindness, just like a Japanese person would say. He may have meant something as simple as, “If I find a good job, I will introduce it to you,” and may not have had a concrete plan.

On the other hand, from the foreign suspect’s point of view, if his former boss said, ‘I will take care of you,’ he may have felt that he was ‘guaranteed a future. He was told that he would be offered a specific job. The suspect could not understand Mr. A’s kindness, and he probably committed the crime out of resentment that his situation had not changed at all.”

At the September 14 transfer, Gebremariam got into the convoy with his face down and without looking at the press.