Historical Dictionary of Terrorism Third Edition

TOKYO SUBWAY GAS ATTACK • 671and more than 150 injuries, although as many as 600 people reportedsymptoms. At that time these deaths and illnesses were believed tohave been due to some outbreak of food poisoning, and it was onlyafter the Tokyo subway attacks that Japanese officials realized theMatsumoto incident had been a sarin gas attack.Shoko Asahara, leader of the cult, knew that he was being investigatedby the Japanese police for the 1989 murder of TsutsumiSakamoto, a lawyer who had been investigating allegations of brainwashingon behalf of concerned families of members of the cult.On Asahara’s orders, cult members had murdered Sakamoto alongwith his wife and infant son. A siege mentality prevailed in the cultthat led them to make the sarin gas attack against the national policeheadquarters, located in the building under which the four attackedsubway lines converged. Asahara sent five two-member teams ofcult members to release the liquid sarin in four subway lines, one ofwhich, the Hibaya line, had been assigned two teams, which were toattack two different branches of the line. Followers punctured plasticbags containing sarin on the four subways on trains bound into thecity from suburbs on 20 March 1995. The attack failed to producethe disruption intended in part because the sarin used was quite dilute.Nonetheless, the Tokyo subway gas attack was the first widelyknown use of a chemical or biological agent by a terrorist group.Following the subway gas attack, Asahara was arrested on 16May 1995 while found hiding in a cubbyhole in one of his sect’sproperties. Investigation of the cult’s center on the slope of MountFuji revealed an elaborate three-story facility built to produce chemicaland biological weapons of mass destruction. With the arrest ofAsahara and 400 of his followers, who faced charges ranging fromkidnapping, to illegal production of drugs and weapons, to murder,the Japanese government moved to ban the sect under the Anti-Subversive Law in December 1995. Asahara was sentenced to deathon 27 February 2004; seven of those who delivered the sarin gaspackets were also sentenced to death and the remaining three weresentenced to life imprisonment. Although Asahara has maintainedsilence since the trial and did not give his defense lawyers permissionto appeal his death sentence, they attempted to appeal without hispermission, maintaining that he was mentally ill and not competent tomake this decision. On 27 March 2008 the Tokyo High Court turneddown the motion by the defense team for the right to appeal on behalf