Friday’s planned start of another Aum Shinrikyo trial will cast renewed attention on the legacy of the sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway nearly 20 years ago. Victims have been speaking in recent interviews about the impact the attack had on their lives ...
It’s been 20 years since mass murderers came to Toshie Koibuchi’s tiny street. It was the night of June 27, 1994. She was then 50, a housewife living with her husband and mother in a slightly upmarket residential area of Matsumoto, Nagano Prefecture. Koibuchi ...
It is difficult to fathom that a religious group might be behind a poison gas attack on hundreds of civilians. More likely, logic suggests, it would either be the result of a terrible accident or the work of a deranged individual. When confronted with ...
Former Aum Shinrikyo fugitive Naoko Kikuchi said Friday she had no idea that cult superiors had roped her into a plot to build and send a parcel bomb to the Tokyo Metropolitan Government headquarters in 1995. Kikuchi, 42, is pleading not guilty to charges ...
Former Aum Shinrikyo cultist Naoko Kikuchi pleads not guilty to attempted murder for her role in the 1995 bombing of a Tokyo City Hall office.
Ex-Aum fugitive Makoto Hirata hid for 17 years because he feared being blamed for the 1995 shooting of the national police chief if he surrendered, his girlfriend testifies.
A condemned Aum Shinrikyo member testifies in the Tokyo District Court that fellow cultist Makoto Hirata had no foreknowledge of the 1995 bombing of a professor’s condominium.
Aum Shinrikyo’s criminal activities began in the late 1980s and culminated in the 1995 nerve-gas attacks on Tokyo’s subway system. The group was founded in 1984 by Shoko Asahara, the babbling, half-blind guru whose real name is Chizuo Matsumoto. Initially starting life as a ...
Aum Shinrikyo killer Noboru Nakamura testifies against ex-fugitive cultist Makoto Hirata, saying the defendant, despite his denial, had prior knowledge that he would be involved in the 1995 abduction of a Tokyo notary.
Makoto Hirata, one of the last Aum Shinrikyo cultists yet to be tried, on Thursday played down his involvement in the 1995 kidnapping of a Tokyo notary, telling the Tokyo District Court in his first trial session that he only drove the getaway car ...
The wife of a condemned Aum Shinrikyo figure was arrested Wednesday for allegedly trying to forcibly recruit an acquaintance into Aleph, the cult’s successor sect, Osaka police said. Yuki Niimi, 36, the wife of death-row inmate Tomomitsu Niimi, 49, is suspected of using her ...
The Tokyo High Court upheld on Wednesday a lower court ruling ordering the metropolitan government to pay damages to religious group Aleph, previously known as Aum Shinrikyo, for releasing an investigative report that attributed the 1995 attempted murder of the national police chief to ...
