Word: culted
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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...
Then the police made a yet more dramatic discovery. In a warehouse down a hill from the group's living quarters, they uncovered vast quantities of toxic chemicals, among them many of the constituent ingredients of sarin. Cult members insisted the chemicals were for such legitimate purposes as making pottery and processing semiconductors for a cult-owned business. Says Kenji Mori, a professor of organic chemistry at the University of Tokyo who has visited the compound: "Logically that may be so, but the volume of ingredients makes the place look more like a chemical factory than a religious compound...
...also appears to engage in the classic--and lucrative--cult practice of taking over its members' financial assets. One 35-year-old who has since left the group says that when he became a devout follower, he was required to surrender his passport to the group and donate all his cash and belongings. He also recounts working under near slave-labor conditions at a sect project on the southern island of Kyushu. "Their strategy is to wear you down and take control of your mind," he says. "They promise you heaven, but they make you live in hell...
That speaker, who will not give his name, has worked with the Lawyers' Group on Behalf of the Victims of Aum Shinrikyo, one of the organizations founded to oppose the cult. It was formed in memory of the first people Aum may have kidnapped. In June 1989, an attorney named Tsutsumi Sakamoto took on the case of a family trying to locate their child, who had joined Aum. Five months later Sakamoto, his wife and infant son disappeared...
...case was never solved, but it cast a shadow over the organization. Last February 68-year-old Kiyoshi Kariya tried to prevent his cult-member sister, a wealthy widow, from giving Aum the building in which his office was located. The sister disappeared, and shortly afterward an Aum member questioned Kariya on her whereabouts. On Feb. 28, four young men jumped out of a Mitsubishi van and grabbed him. He has not been seen since. When police found a similar van with traces of Kariya's blood in it and the fingerprints of sect members, they issued a warrant...