More than two decades after Japan’s Aum Shinrikyo cult plunged Tokyo into terror by releasing a nerve agent on rush-hour metro trains, its spinoffs continue to attract new followers.
Cult head Shoko Asahara is on death row, along with 12 of his disciples, for crimes including the metro attack, which killed 13 people and injured thousands.
He was arrested in 1995 in the wake of the sarin attack, but the Aum cult survived the crackdown, renaming itself Aleph and drawing new recruits into its fold.
Photo: AFP
Aleph officially renounced ties to Asahara in 2000, but the doomsday guru retains significant influence, the Japanese Public Security Intelligence Agency said.
“[Aleph] is a group that firmly instructs its followers to see Asahara as the supreme being,” an agency investigator told reporters, speaking on condition of anonymity.
“If someone says ‘guru Asahara wants to bring down Japan,’ there would be followers who would act. The group poses such a potential danger,” he said.
Raids on Aleph facilities have found recordings of his teachings, as well as a device used by the Aum cult known as a “Perfect Salvation Initiation,” a type of headgear that emits weak electric currents which members believe connects them to Asahara’s brainwaves.
Aleph and other splinter groups, which deny links to Asahara despite the claims of authorities, have 1,650 members in Japan and hundreds more in Russia, the agency said.
It said the groups attract about 100 new followers annually via yoga classes, fortune telling and other activities that do not mention the cult’s name, often targeting young people who do not remember the 1995 subway attack.
“Young female followers go to ‘training’ places with their children ... We are worried there is an increasing number of children who have been inculcated by the Aum since they were very young,” the investigator said.
Asahara and his wife Tomoko had four daughters and two sons, and most of the family remains within the cult.
In early March, on Asahara’s 63rd birthday, investigators were keeping their usual close eye on the headquarters of an Aum splinter group in a quiet Tokyo residential area.
“We are not marking the day in any way,” said Akitoshi Hirosue, deputy head of the Hikarinowa (“Circle of Rainbow Light”) group. “We actually think Asahara should be executed.”
Hikarinowa split from Aleph in 2007 under the leadership of flamboyant former Aum spokesman Fumihiro Joyu and now has about 100 to 150 members.
“As long as the death penalty is not implemented against him, Asahara is the ‘savior exempt from execution’ and helps Aleph win more followers,” Joyu has said in arguing for the death of his former guru.
Aleph training halls are closed to media and the group did not respond to enquiries.
Taro Takimoto, a lawyer who has helped relatives of cultists for decades, supports capital punishment for Asahara, but not the 12 other members on death row, who he says only acted as “limbs” of the guru.
He fears the 12 members would “become martyrs” if executed, only boosting cult recruitment.
Seven of those on death row were moved to different prison facilities in recent days, prompting speculation that they could soon be executed. It was not clear whether Asahara was among them.
Asahara’s execution might draw a line under the Aum’s crimes for some Japanese, but Takimoto warns it could also trigger suicides among his followers and lead to the appointment of a successor guru.
A leading candidate is Asahara’s second son, Takimoto said.
“If the second son, bearing Asahara’s ashes, declares himself ‘guru,’ he would gain serious religious authority,” opening a new chapter on the cult, Takimoto said.
Swedish campaigner Greta Thunberg was deported from Israel yesterday, the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs said, the day after the Israeli navy prevented her and a group of fellow pro-Palestinian activists from sailing to Gaza. Thunberg, 22, was put on a flight to France, the ministry said, adding that she would travel on to Sweden from there. Three other people who had been aboard the charity vessel also agreed to immediate repatriation. Eight other crew members are contesting their deportation order, Israeli rights group Adalah, which advised them, said in a statement. They are being held at a detention center ahead of a
A Chinese scientist was arrested while arriving in the US at Detroit airport, the second case in days involving the alleged smuggling of biological material, authorities said on Monday. The scientist is accused of shipping biological material months ago to staff at a laboratory at the University of Michigan. The FBI, in a court filing, described it as material related to certain worms and requires a government permit. “The guidelines for importing biological materials into the US for research purposes are stringent, but clear, and actions like this undermine the legitimate work of other visiting scholars,” said John Nowak, who leads field
Former Nicaraguan president Violeta Chamorro, who brought peace to Nicaragua after years of war and was the first woman elected president in the Americas, died on Saturday at the age of 95, her family said. Chamorro, who ruled the poor Central American country from 1990 to 1997, “died in peace, surrounded by the affection and love of her children,” said a statement issued by her four children. As president, Chamorro ended a civil war that had raged for much of the 1980s as US-backed rebels known as the “Contras” fought the leftist Sandinista government. That conflict made Nicaragua one of
NUCLEAR WARNING: Elites are carelessly fomenting fear and tensions between nuclear powers, perhaps because they have access to shelters, Tulsi Gabbard said After a trip to Hiroshima, US Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard on Tuesday warned that “warmongers” were pushing the world to the brink of nuclear war. Gabbard did not specify her concerns. Gabbard posted on social media a video of grisly footage from the world’s first nuclear attack and of her staring reflectively at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial. On Aug. 6, 1945, the US obliterated Hiroshima, killing 140,000 people in the explosion and by the end of the year from the uranium bomb’s effects. Three days later, a US plane dropped a plutonium bomb on Nagasaki, leaving abut 74,000 people dead by the
RSS