TOKYO — The former leader of a doomsday cult that carried out a deadly nerve gas attack on the Tokyo subway in 1995 was executed on Friday, Japanese media reported. Six other cult members were also hanged in detention centers across Japan.
Shoko Asahara was the leader of the Aum Shinrikyo or Aum Supreme Truth cult that was responsible for releasing sarin gas on five Tokyo subway trains during the rush hour in 1995, killing 13 people and poisoning more than 6,000 others.
He was sentenced to death in 2004, one of 13 cult members who ended up on death row and the first to be executed.
Asahara, 63, a partially blind former yoga instructor, believed that the United States would attack Japan with nuclear weapons and that only cult members would survive World War III.
He mixed Buddhist and Hindu beliefs with apocalyptic Christian prophecies, variously declaring himself to be an incarnation of Shiva, the Hindu god of destruction and recreation, as well as Christ and the first enlightened being since Buddha. At its peak, Aum had tens of thousands of followers, mostly in Japan and Russia.
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Sarin is a deadly nerve gas originally developed by the Nazis.
Aum members first released it in 1994 in the central Japanese city of Matsumoto, in a failed attack on three judges set to rule on the cult, nevertheless killing eight people and making hundreds ill. Cult members also staged several failed attempts to release hydrogen cyanide on subway trains following the 1995 attack.
Asahara was convicted of ordering both sarin gas attacks, and also of ordering cult members to kill a lawyer who had been helping parents free their children from the cult’s clutches. The lawyer, 33-year-old Tsutsumi Sakamoto, was strangled in his home in 1989, along with his wife and 1-year-old son.
But it was the Tokyo subway attack on March 20, 1995, and the images of rush-hour commuters lying dead, vomiting, gasping for breath and staggering from the effects of sarin, that shocked the nation and woke it up to the dangers of a cult that was based on a huge commune at the foot of Mount Fuji.
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Cult members used sharp umbrellas to puncture plastic bags filled with liquid sarin in crowded trains. Experts said the death toll could have been much higher if the group had been better chemists and produced a purer form of the compound.
Aum evolved from a yoga school began by Asahara in 1984, and gained many followers from Japan’s elite universities, attracted by his promise of a meaningful life free from the pressures of modern Japan. But it gradually became increasingly paranoid and violent.
Aum is designated as a terrorist organization in the United States and is illegal in Russia but lives on in Japan, renaming itself Aleph in 2000 and giving rise to two smaller splinter groups, including Hikari no Wa (Circle of Rainbow Light), headed by Aum’s former spokesman Fumihiro Joyu.
Japan’s Public Security Intelligence Agency says it keeps all three groups under close supervision as practitioners of “dangerous religions,” and says they still have around 1,650 members in Japan, about 460 in Russia and assets of more than $9 million, according to Kyodo News.
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In 2016, Russian police raided dozens of properties occupied by suspected cult members, and Montenegro expelled 58 foreigners also believed to be followers of Aum Shinrikyo, the BBC reported.
Prosecutors said the Tokyo attacks were carried out in revenge for the failure of Asahara and 24 followers to win elections for Japan’s House of Representatives in 2000, Kyodo reported. Asahara, whose real name is Chizuo Matsumoto, pleaded not guilty and never testified, remaining silent or muttering incomprehensibly during the eight years of his trial.
The sentence was upheld by the Supreme Court in 2006, and the executions followed the failure of a final appeal on behalf of one of the cult members in January.
But Amnesty International, which opposes the death penalty in all circumstances, said the executions had failed to deliver justice.
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“The attacks carried out by Aum were despicable and those responsible deserve to be punished. However, the death penalty is never the answer,” said Hiroka Shoji, East Asia researcher at Amnesty International.
“Justice demands accountability but also respect for everyone’s human rights. The death penalty can never deliver this as it is the ultimate denial of human rights.”
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