Japan’s chief cabinet secretary, Yoshihide Suga, confirmed Asahara’s execution. The justice ministry later confirmed that six other senior cult members were executed on the same day.
Asahara’s execution was the first of 13 former Aum members who have been condemned to death.
His Aum Supreme Truth cult, which combined a bizarre mix of Buddhist and Hindu meditation along with Christian and apocalyptic teachings, yoga and the occult, once boasted more than 10,000 followers in Japan and an estimated 30,000 in Russia.
Its members included graduates of Japan’s best universities, who were attracted by promises that they would survive the coming Armageddon – a nuclear attack by the US – by developing sarin, a nerve agent invented by the Nazis, at the cult’s compound in the foothills of Mount Fuji.
Asahara, whose real name was Chizuo Matsumoto, had also been found guilty of masterminding an earlier attack on a city in northern Japan in which eight people died and more than 100 were injured.
The former cult leader had exhausted all of his appeals after he was sentenced to death in 2004.
The Tokyo subway gas attack began shortly before 8am on 20 March 1995, when five members of the cult punctured plastic bags containing liquid sarin with the sharpened tips of their umbrellas before fleeing.
The former leader of the doomsday cult that carried out a fatal gas attack on the Tokyo subway in March 1995 was executed on Friday.
Shoko Asahara, who masterminded the attack in which 13 people died and more than 6,000 others fell ill, was hanged at a detention centre.
Japan’s chief cabinet secretary, Yoshihide Suga, confirmed Asahara’s execution. The justice ministry later confirmed that six other senior cult members were executed on the same day.
Asahara’s execution was the first of 13 former Aum members who have been condemned to death.
Source: Theguardian
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