Tokyo: A member of the doomsday cult behind a deadly Tokyo subway gas attack and other crimes turned himself in to police after 17 years on the run, an official said yesterday.
A Tokyo metropolitan police official said Makoto Hirata, a member of Aum Shinrikyo, conspired with several other members in kidnapping a notary official in 1995 and causing his death. The victim, Kiyoshi Kariya, then 68, was the brother of a follower trying to quit the group.
Hirata, 46, who had been on the run since the summer of 1995, turned himself in at a Tokyo police station and was detained early yesterday, the police official said on condition of anonymity.
The cult also released sarin nerve gas in Tokyo's subway system in 1995, killing 13 people and injuring more than 6,000 in Japan's deadliest act of domestic terrorism.
The cult had amassed an arsenal of chemical, biological and conventional weapons in anticipation of an apocalyptic showdown with the government.
Police say Hirata and other cult members kidnapped Kariya off a Tokyo street and confined him at the group's tightly guarded commune at the foot of Mount Fuji. They allegedly used anaesthetics on Kariya to get him to talk about his sister, who escaped from the group after being pressed to donate her land. Kariya died from a drug overdose, police said. According to court testimony, cult members burned Kariya's body in an incinerator inside the commune.
