A 28-year-old woman died after being attacked by a hatchet-wielding man Thursday in a coffee shop in the city of Okazaki, Aichi Prefecture.
Police identified the woman as Chie Ishida and the suspect as Akira Matsumoto, her former husband who died later in the day in an apparent suicide jump from a building.
Ishida, a resident of the city, burst into the Maria coffee shop at around 9:50 a.m. screaming for help. Chasing her was a man who swung a hatchet with a 25-cm wide blade into her back, police said.
Ishida was rushed to a hospital but died about an hour later due to shock stemming from blood loss, authorities said.
Hidetoshi Narita, a 38-year-old junior high school teacher who happened to be in the shop at the time, was injured trying to intervene, they said. The injuries will require two weeks to heal.
The attacker ran out of the shop, tossed the hatchet and fled south, according to witnesses. He apparently escaped by car, investigators said.
Later in the day, police said Matsumoto had jumped from a 10-story apartment building in the city of Anjo. He was taken to a nearby hospital but later died of shock stemming from blood loss, they said. Police believe Matsumoto's death was a suicide.
Matsumoto and Ishida married in May 1996 and divorced in August 1997. Ishida paid an unspecified amount of money to Matsumoto in March and remarried.
Ishida and her husband visited a police station Saturday to tell officers that Matsumoto was threatening to assault the couple, her husband said.