Japanese Woman Stabs Seven-Year-old Girl
"Around 3:58 p.m. (0658 GMT), the police received an emergency call, saying that a girl was injured on a road in Gifu city," a spokesman for the Gifu prefectural police said.
Gifu City is located about 380 kilometers (240 miles) west of Tokyo.
A 37-year-old woman used a fruit knife to stab the second grader in the stomach, as she was returning home from elementary school, the spokesman said.
The woman then went to a nearby house and asked to call police, the spokesman said, declining to be named.
Police arrested the woman at 4:15 p.m., the spokesman said. He was unable to comment on the woman's mental state at the time.
The girl was hospitalized and is expected to need about a week of treatment, he said, adding her condition was not life-threatening.
The name of the woman was not released because police were still in the process of obtaining a formal arrest warrant for the woman, the spokesman added.
The motive for the attack and the woman's relationship to the girl, if any, were not immediately known, he said.
The incident was the latest in a series of alarms over knives since a schizophrenic ran amok at Ikeda elementary school in western Japan on June 8 and stabbed eight children to death in a frenzied attack.
The next day, an 11-year-old boy was stabbed a dozen times by a schoolmate in a southern Japanese city
On June 10, Japanese police caught a knife-wielding man at a school playground not far from Ikeda.
Late on Monday night, a man was arrested after bursting into a regional bureau of the conservative ***Sankei Shimbun*** newspaper brandishing a knife, according to ***Kyodo News***.
No one was hurt in the incident which occurred in Maebashi, Gunma Prefecture, north of Tokyo.
On Tuesday, a woman stabbed a teacher in the arm with a knife at a kindergarten in Tokyo.
The woman, believed to be aged around 50, stabbed a female teacher at the Takachiho Kindergarten in Tokyo's Suginami District after demanding that she open the gate, police said.