Two coroners who examined the bodies of six victims of the March 1995 Tokyo subway nerve gas attack said in court Sept. 18 that their autopsy results do not contradict prosecutors' claims that the deaths were from sarin poisoning.
Naohito Kuroda, a professor at the medical department of Hirosaki University, and Hayato Hasekura, a professor of Tokyo Medical and Dental University, took the witness stand for the prosecution in a Tokyo District Court hearing for Aum Shinrikyo founder Shoko Asahara, accused of masterminding the attack. Although sarin traces were not directly detected in four of the five bodies Kuroda examined after the gas attack, the extremely low doses of the bodies' internal cholin esterase -- an enzyme needed to relax muscle tensions -- obviously show they all were victims of some kind of nerve gas, Kuroda said.
The gas was most probably sarin, which cult members allegedly released in the subway attack that killed 12 people and injured 3,795, he added. Kuroda said he is not sure whether the victims absorbed the toxic substance by inhaling the gas or touching the liquid.
Hasekura, who examined the body of Katuaki Tanaka, said his autopsy result could specify the cause of death because Tanaka was examined for two weeks at a hospital where he had been in a brain-dead state after the attack. The hospital's diagnosis that the enzyme in his blood had an extremely low count would prove he died of inhaling sarin, Hasekura said.
Asahara, dressed in blue sports wear and with his hair cut to a length just covering his ears, never kept still during the hearing. Using both Japanese and English, he occasionally answered prosecutors' questions simultaneously with the witnesses and was ordered to be quiet by the presiding judge three times in the morning session.