Word: cults
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Police named a suspect in the Matsumoto sarin case, but dismissed him; no one was ever charged. That did not comfort Aum's nervous neighbors in Kamikuishiki. A month later they noticed that the leaves on the trees near the cult's compound had suddenly turned brown. Shortly afterward the family living nearest the compound woke up with nausea and sore eyes. There was "a horrible smell, like burning plastic," said retired farmer Norie Okamoto, who informed the police. The cultists got off with a warning, and the villagers were furious, especially when the Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper disclosed that police...
Even before the Matsumoto poisonings, sarin had become a staple of Asahara's rhetoric. A cult publication quotes a March 1994 sermon to his chapter in Kochi: "The law in an emergency is to kill one's opponent in a single blow, for instance the way research was conducted on soman [another Nazi gas] and sarin during World War II." He regularly charged that the U.S. was using the toxic chemical against him and his followers...
That was the poisoned state of affairs on March 19, when the Osaka police broke into one of the cult's offices and freed a student they claimed was being held there against his will. The raid had been a long time in the planning, both in order to assemble evidence and because the Japanese authorities are particularly sensitive to charges that they are persecuting religious groups. Nonetheless, concerns about Aum's possible connection with sarin and other sect-related tensions prompted them to act. In response, the cult's leaders had its lawyers file suit. And the next...
Once the police uncovered Aum's huge stockpiles of lethal chemicals, several things changed. In addition to announcing publicly that Asahara is wanted for questioning about the subway poisoning, the traditionally reticent Japanese police revealed that they were entertaining 110 complaints against the cult for offenses including unlawful confinement, assault and theft. The charges seemed to embolden local authorities, who were reported in the press to be investigating a cult hospital in Tokyo's Nakano neighborhood and allegations of electronic bugging in Yamanashi. The Nagano prefectural police, acting on the soil samples that so perturbed the cult's neighbors, have...
...network in which he echoed his lawyers' earlier line, denying involvement in Kiyoshi Kariya's kidnapping and providing innocent household explanations for the seized chemicals. "I don't understand," he concluded, "why it's said that these can be used to make sarin." A second video was recorded for cult followers and played at 36 local chapters. In it Asahara claimed that Aum members, including himself, had been the object of a poison-gas attack. The origin was "unmistakably...