Word: aum
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
When they finally found Shoko Asahara, the leader of the Aum Shinrikyo cult, he was hiding in the dark, lying alone in a space not much bigger than a coffin. For four hours police had searched the unlighted interior of Satian No. 6 (satian is Sanskrit for "supreme truth"), a warehouse in an Aum compound near Mount Fuji. Then an investigator tapped on a wall and found a hollow spot. Police cut in with an electric saw and discovered a bearded man in a deep pink pajama suit lying in a compartment about 10 ft. long and 3 ft. high...
...arrest brought the first spell of relief from the fear that had gripped Japan for two months. The nation had been holding its breath, worried that another horror would occur before police built their case against Aum. On May 5 a cleaning woman in Tokyo's sprawling Shinjuku station found a hydrogen-cyanide gas bomb before it went off. The device had been placed near a ventilation duct that would have spread the gas quickly. It was potent enough to have killed 10,000 people...
...months police swept through the extensive offices, factories and businesses of Aum in search of evidence and arrested dozens of lower-ranking members on a variety of minor charges. They discovered that Aum had as many as 30,000 members in Russia, where the group bought chemical-weapons detection gear, and owned a ranch in Australia, where the sarin gas was tested on sheep. For fear of being seen to be treading on religious freedom, Japanese police were reluctant to question key Aum figures until they had clinching evidence of their guilt. However, after Hideo Murai, a top Aum science...
...break came after the arrest on April 26 of Masami Tsuchiya, 30, a doctoral student in organic chemistry who police said led the effort to make sarin. Charged initially with the minor crime of helping other Aum members evade arrest, he was extensively questioned about the sarin attack. In consultation with a psychologist, police found they were able to break Tsuchiya quickly, despite his reputation as a hard-core Aum member. Shoko Egawa, an expert on the cult, offered an explanation: "The best-educated members were really prized by Asahara and did not go through the same indoctrination that...
...paper, a notebook kept by Kiyohide Hayakawa, theAum Shinrikyo cult's No. 2 leader, details plans to destroy Japan's leadershipin a series of simultaneous guerrilla raids starting as early as next November. According to Ikuo Hayashi, another cult leader, the cult hoped to set up an "Aum Kingdom" by killing the country's top officials. The new disclosures add more fuel to speculation thatcult guru Shoko Asahara was planning to cause the apocalypse that he has predicted for 1997.WANT TO BE IN PICTURES? A bizarre twist in the case came with a report from another major Tokyo daily saying...