Word: sarin
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...carry out the salvation plan and face death without regrets." His attorney was less cosmic in his approach. Maintained Yoshinobu Aoyama: "We practice our religion on the basis of Buddhist doctrines such as no killing, so it is impossible that we are responsible. In my personal view, sarin could not be made by those other than special persons like those in the U.S. military. I speculate that someone in the military and state authorities may have been involved." He called the raids "unprecedented religious persecution...
...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...
...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 day, Japan is whispering, it did more...