Word: aum
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...quick pre-dawn raid Japanese police stormed the Boeing 747 where an unidentified hijacker had held 365 hostages for fifteen hours. The hijacker was rapidly subdued, and only one woman was hurt in the attack. Officials initially said the hijacker was amember of the Aum Shinrikyocult and had threatened to blow up the plane ifcult leader Shoko Asahara was not immediately released, but those reports were later denied. It is not yet known whether the hijacker, who used an ice-pick in the attack, also had a bomb...
Since Japanese police arrested the guru of the Aum Shinrikyo cult on May 16, frightening facts have emerged indicating that Asahara had the money, the means and the intention to wreak his version of Armageddon on Japan. The March 20 nerve-gas attack on the Tokyo subway system, which killed 12 people and sickened 5,500, and the thwarted attempt to spread deadly hydrogen cyanide gas in the Shinjuku station on May 5 were intended as preludes to worse disasters, police sources are suggesting in leaks to the Japanese press. The big show was apparently set for November, when plans...
...could have been horrific. To triumph in that war, the cult built a series of munitions factories within its complex at the foot of Mount Fuji. Aum researchers were trying to develop germ weapons -- including the Ebola virus -- and an assembly line was about to produce automatic rifles. Behind one building's false walls was a $700,000 lab able to turn out 60 to 80 kg a month of the nerve gas sarin -- enough to kill 6 million to 8 million people. One plan called for releasing the sarin over Tokyo from 1.65-m-long remote-controlled helicopters. Asahara...
...determined that the cult should survive it. By March 1994 that vision had altered dramatically. Asahara apparently had become interested less in surviving the war than in starting it, and for unexplained reasons he moved the timetable forward to 1995. He had funds -- a senior cult member admitted that Aum has assets of more than $1 billion -- and an inner circle of Ph.D.s that was split into groups to produce conventional arms, chemical weapons, biological weapons and drugs. The least successful initiative was germ research, even though Aum sent a medical team to Zaire in 1992 following mistaken reports...
...attack in June last year in Matsumoto, in central Japan, which killed seven and injured more than 200. Meanwhile, his wife Tomoko Matsumoto, 36, is in the process of taking control of the group, which has yet to see major defections. Fear may be a factor: reports say Aum members under arrest have confessed that a cement-grinding machine found at the cult's main commune was used to pulverize the bones of members who died during initiation rites or were otherwise done away with...