A doctor who helped lead the sarin nerve gas attack on a Tokyo underground train station will be hanged. Doomsday cult lieutenant Tomomasa Nakagawa, 41, has been sentenced to the death penalty for the attack in 1995, which killed 12 people, and another earlier attack that killed seven people. He has also been found guilty of taking part in earlier murders. Nakagawa is the 10th member of the Aum Shinri Kyo sect to be given the death sentence.
Closing arguments are being [presented] in the trial of the sect’s guru Shoko Asahara, who is also facing a possible death sentence for allegedly organising the subway gassing. Asahara has claimed he is innocent, and his lawyers have argued that Aum disciples acted on their own. The subway gassing was the worst case of urban terrorism in Japan’s history. Raids of cult headquarters and confessions of leading members later revealed the cult had numerous plots to overthrow the government and operated labs to develop chemical and biological weapons. At its height, the sect claimed 30,000 members, about a third of them in Russia. It still exists under the name Aleph, but its membership has dwindled to about 1,000 or so. |