Word: cult
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...heretofore obscure sect called Aum Shinrikyo, which translates as Aum Supreme Truth. The sect, which started as a yoga school, focuses on the apocalypse to come-perhaps as soon as 1997. Its members insist it merely practices a form of Buddhism; but in reality it is a cult revolving around a long-haired, charismatic mystic, Shoko Asahara, a magnetic misfit who preaches that government efforts to obliterate his movement will coincide with the beginning of the end of the world. Throughout the week, the hidden guru pleaded his innocence via radio broadcast and videotape, then vanished, leaving behind three luxury...
...suspicions of most Japanese are true, and the cult is responsible for the subway atrocity, it would embody something much more sinister than even the Branch Davidian group led by David Koresh, who ultimately posed his most deadly danger to his own followers. The subway poisoning seems to represent an aggressive, outward-reaching insanity, as if Koresh had somehow become melded with the Tylenol killer. It suggests a new type of evil, a terrorism whose demands are so personal and obscure that no one can understand them, let alone satisfy them. Or put another way, garden-variety madness...
...transfixed public, Japan's national police deployed 2,500 troops to the doors of 25 Aum Shinrikyo offices around the country. Officially they were investigating the February kidnapping of the 68-year-old manager of a notary public office suspected of having been spirited away by the cult. But the gas masks and the birds betrayed their real concerns...
...turned out, those precautions were not necessary. Cult members appeared to know the police were coming. Before the troops approached the main compound at Kamikuishiki, 110 miles west of Tokyo, the faithful swept searchlights over the grounds. When the siege force reached a makeshift barricade at the entrance, a young man shouted, "The Aum Supreme Truth has nothing to hide! It is an unjust search, but we will cooperate...
What the investigators found first was bizarre. Inside the compound were 50 small cubicles, each containing a cult member lying on a blanket. All were suffering from malnutrition, but most claimed they were fasting voluntarily, and only six of the most seriously wasted were hospitalized. Another young woman was reportedly lifted from inside a small windowless container in which she had been confined since mid-January. The only arrests the police made were of three doctors on the premises and a cult official, on suspicion of unlawful confinement...