Bookbinder kills parents, wife before attempting suicide

A man whose business was crumbling stabbed to death his parents and wife while they slept and seriously injured his two sons at their house in Tokyo early Friday, police said.

The suspect, Masao Enari, 42, a bookbinder in Bunkyo Ward, was injured in an apparent suicide attempt. His 12-year-old daughter, a sixth-grader of an elementary school, escaped the rampage by fleeing to a neighbor's house.

"I did everything," police quoted Enari as saying.

His company had been facing sharp declines in sales in recent months because some of his major clients had decided to close down or relocate, employees of the company said.

The first floor of Enari's three-story house was used as a bindery.

The dead were identified as the suspect's father, Mitsuo Enari, 74, his mother, Toshiko, 70, and his wife, Nobuko, 37, police said.

His seriously injured sons were an 8-year-old second-grader at an elementary school and a 4-year-old kindergarten pupil.

According to police, Enari's neighbor called police at 12:15 a.m. Friday, saying, "There are injured people in the house next door."

Police found Mitsuo on a nursing-care bed on the second floor and Toshiko on a futon in the next room. Nobuko was found in the dining-kitchen area on the third floor.

Mitsuo, Toshiko and Nobuko were all pronounced dead at a hospital.

Enari and his two sons were on futon in a bedroom next to the dining-kitchen area.

All six were wearing nightclothes and had been stabbed several times in the chest, abdomen and other parts of their bodies, police said.

A bloodstained kitchen knife was found in the bedroom on the third floor.

At the time of the attacks, the daughter was sleeping in a different room on the third floor. After being woken up by the sounds in the next room, she fled to the house of a neighbor.

The bookbinding company, called Sanseishashiko, has six employees and was based in the house in a residential area about a kilometer from Myogadani Station on the Marunouchi subway line. The house is near the Koishikawa Botanical Gardens.(IHT/Asahi: March 29,2008)