JAPAN: Shoko Asahara, the leader of doomsday cult Aum Shinrikyo, whose followers launched a horrific nerve gas attack on a Tokyo subway in 1995, was sentenced to death yesterday in a Japanese court.
Presiding judge Shoji Ogawa said Asahara's actions were merciless and that he bore grave responsibility for the subway attack, which killed 12 and injured thousands, many of whom remain ill and traumatised.
These despicable crimes deserve the ultimate penalty,said the judge, dismissing claims by Asahara's defence team that he had lost control over his followers and finding him guilty of all 13 charges, involving the deaths of 27 people.
The charges included the 1989 killing of lawyer Tsutsumi Sakamoto along with his wife and baby son, and the gassing of a residential neighbourhood in Kumamoto, central Japan in 1994, which killed seven and sickened over 600.
Judge Ogawa described how the Sakamoto family was attacked while sleeping and how, despite pleas from the infant's mother, members of the cult strangled all three. Sakamoto had begun to investigate claims by ex-Aum members that they had been kidnapped and brainwashed.
During the judge's lengthy summation the cult leader, dressed in black and with his once unruly hair and beard trimmed short, occasionally laughed and mumbled incoherently but gave no reaction when the verdict was read out.
Asahara has remained mostly silent throughout hundreds of appearances in the marathon seven-year trial, deepening the mystery about the cult's motives and angering the families of his victims.
Fusae Kobayashi, whose son was killed in the 1994 Kumamoto gas attack said: "\ deserves the death penalty. I can't express the pain I've felt and I've been waiting for this day for so long, but nothing really changes with this verdict. What we would like is an explanation and an apology."
Shizue Takahashi, whose husband Kazumasa died after picking up a pouch filled with liquefied sarin gas in Kasumigaseki Station in 1995, said: "Of course I think this is the only possible verdict, but the fact that the trial has ended without Asahara saying one word about what he did is very frustrating."
Irishman Michael Kennedy, who spent four days in hospital after being poisoned in the subway attack, said he thinks the cult leader deserved the death penalty because of the hardship and trouble he set out to cause.
In the absence of an explanation from the blind guru himself, the victims and their families will have to do with the speculations of Judge Ogawa, who said Asahara "considered himself a god who wanted to seize control of Japan in the name of religious salvation".
The judge said Asahara plotted to use the cult's helicopters to dump 70 tons of sarin gas over Tokyo in a plot to become "king of the capital".