Death sentence for cult leader

last updated 8 January 2015

Tokyo

The former leader of Aum Shinrikyo, the religious cult that released sarin gas into the Tokyo subway in 1995, was sentenced to death this week. Shoko Asahara was found guilty of directing the attack, which killed 12 people and sickened more than 5,000, in postwar Japan’s worst act of terrorism. “The defendant schemed to scatter large amounts of sarin in Tokyo to destroy the capital, build an Aum state, and rule as its king,” the judge said. The nearly blind, often incomprehensible Asahara built his cult around a mixture of Buddhist and Hindu teachings. By the mid-1990s, he had some 10,000 followers in Japan and more than 30,000 in Russia.