Word: matsumotos
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...picture of an Indian saint, he went berserk and said I should not respect anyone but him." In this way, perhaps Asahara's early life was a foreshadowing of what would come later. "When I look at the way Aum operates," a onetime classmate in Kumamoto said, "I think Matsumoto is trying to create a closed society like the school for the blind he went to. He is trying to create a society separate from ordinary society in which he can become king of the castle...
...then the cult had conceived a disquieting fascination with sarin. In 1991 Aum was involved in a land dispute in the city of Matsumoto. Last June the hearings had been completed, and a three-judge panel was about to rule; but three weeks before their decision was due, someone released a cloud of sarin, a substance more usually associated with national arsenals and weapons treaties, into the Matsumoto night. Seven people were killed and 200 injured; of the three judges, all of whom were sleeping in the affected area, all required treatment, and one was hospitalized. There has been...
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...
...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 begun investigating Aum's link to the deaths in Matsumoto...