TOKYO - A man accused of attempted murder and arson in a 2021 attack on a Tokyo train while dressed in a Joker's costume admitted Monday to trying to kill a man he stabbed and starting a fire onboard, but his defense team denied the fire was intended to kill other passengers.

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Kyota Hattori, 26, made the statement at the opening hearing of his trial at the Tachikawa branch of the Tokyo District Court. In all, he was accused of the attempted murder of 13 passengers including the man he stabbed.

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According to the indictment, Hattori stabbed a man in his 70s in the chest onboard a Keio Line commuter express service headed to Shinjuku, a busy station in central Tokyo, from Hachioji in the west of the capital, on Halloween night.

He then spread lighter fuel and ignited it with the intention of killing other passengers, the indictment said.

In the trial, prosecutors quoted Hattori as having told investigators following his arrest, "I don't have any worth as a person. I have no choice but to kill a lot of people and get the death penalty."

He began harboring such thoughts after encountering trouble at work following his graduation from high school in Fukuoka Prefecture in southwestern Japan, they said.

Describing the crime as "deliberate," they noted he had prepared the items he used in the attack beforehand and that by spreading the lighter fuel on the train, Hattori "was aware that multiple people could die."

The prosecutors said Hattori conceived the attack on the Keio Line train after seeing media reports about another knife attack on an Odakyu Electric Railway commuter train a few months earlier in which a man stabbed and slashed 10 passengers.

In this incident, the male suspect spread cooking oil but the oil failed to ignite.

Hattori's defense team, meanwhile, denied his intention to kill other passengers, saying in their opening statement that when he threw a lighter inside the train to start the fire, the passengers had already fled the area.

The stabbed man was briefly in critical condition. His injury needed around three months of treatment, the indictment said.

The incident caused panic, and when the train made an emergency stop at a station passengers tried to escape through windows when the doors did not immediately open.

==Kyodo