Aum Shinrikyo

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Shoko Asahara demonstrating levitational abilities




https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aum_Shinrikyo#After_1995

Aum Shinrikyo (jap. オウム真理教), which split into Aleph and Hikari no Wa in 2007, is a Japanese doomsday cult founded by Shoko Asahara in 1984. It gained international notoriety when it carried out the deadly Tokyo subway sarin attack in 1995 and was found to have been responsible for another smaller sarin attack the previous year.

Aum Shinrikyo has been formally designated a terrorist organization by several countries, including Canada,[2] Kazakhstan,[3] and the United States.[4]

Japan's Public Security Examination Commission considers Aleph and Hikari no Wa to be branches of a "dangerous religion"[5] and announced in January 2015 that they would remain under surveillance for three more years.[6]

In 1990, Asahara and 24 other members stood unsuccessfully for the General Elections for the House of Representatives under the banner of Shinri-tō ("Supreme Truth Party"). Asahara made a couple of appearances on TV talk shows in 1991, however at this time the cult started becoming more hostile towards society. In 1992 Aum's Construction Minister Kiyohide Hayakawa published a treatise called Principles of a Citizen's Utopia which has been described as a "declaration of war" against Japan's constitution and civil institutions. At the same time, Hayakawa started to make frequent visits to Russia to acquire military hardware, including AK74s, a MIL Mi-17 military helicopter, and reportedly an attempt to acquire components for a nuclear bomb.[16]

The cult is known to have considered assassinations of several individuals critical of the cult, such as the heads of Buddhist sects Soka Gakkai and The Institute for Research in Human Happiness. After cartoonist Yoshinori Kobayashi and TV commentator Dave Spector began satirizing the cult, they were included on Aum’s assassination list. It attempted to assassinate Kobayashi in 1993.[27]

At the end of 1993, the cult started secretly manufacturing the nerve agent sarin and later VX gas. They also attempted to manufacture 1,000 automatic rifles but only managed to make one.[28] Aum tested its sarin on sheep at Banjawarn Station, a remote pastoral property in Western Australia, killing 29 sheep. Both sarin and VX were then used in several assassinations (and attempts) over 1994–95. In December 1994 and January 1995, Masami Tsuchiya of Aum Shinrikyo synthesized 100 to 200 grams of VX which was used to attack three persons. Two persons were injured and a 28-year-old man died, who is believed to be the only fully documented victim of VX ever in the world.[29] The VX victim, whom Shoko Asahara had suspected as a spy, was attacked at 7 a.m. on 12 December 1994, on the street in Osaka by Tomomitsu Niimi and another Aum member, who sprinkled the nerve agent on his neck. He chased them for about 100 yards (90 metres) before collapsing, dying 10 days later without coming out of a deep coma. Doctors in the hospital suspected at the time he had been poisoned with an organophosphate pesticide. But the cause of death was pinned down only after cult members arrested for the subway attack confessed to the killing. Ethyl methylphosphonate, methylphosphonic acid, and diisopropyl-2-(methylthio) ethylamine were later found in the body of the victim. Unlike the cases for sarin (Matsumoto incident and Sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway), VX was not used for mass murder. Most notably, on the night of 27 June 1994, the cult carried out a chemical weapons attack against civilians when they released sarin in the central Japanese city of Matsumoto, Nagano. This Matsumoto incident killed eight and harmed 200 more. However, police investigations focused only on an innocent local resident, Yoshiyuki Kouno, and failed to implicate the cult at the time.

On the morning of 20 March 1995, Aum members released sarin in a coordinated attack on five trains in the Tokyo subway system, killing 13 commuters, seriously injuring 54 and affecting 980 more. Some estimates claim as many as 6,000 people were injured by the sarin. It is difficult to obtain exact numbers since many victims are reluctant to come forward.[33] Prosecutors allege that Asahara was tipped off about planned police raids on cult facilities by an insider, and ordered an attack in central Tokyo to divert attention away from the group. The plan evidently backfired, and the police conducted huge simultaneous raids on cult compounds across the country.[34]

Over the next week, the full scale of Aum's activities was revealed for the first time. At the cult's headquarters in Kamikuishiki on the foot of Mount Fuji, police found explosives, chemical weapons, and a Russian Mil Mi-17 military helicopter. While the finding of biological warfare agents such as anthrax and Ebola cultures was reported, those claims now appear to have been widely exaggerated.[35] There were stockpiles of chemicals that could be used for producing enough sarin to kill four million people.[36] Police also found laboratories to manufacture drugs such as LSD, methamphetamine, and a crude form of truth serum, a safe containing millions of U.S. dollars in cash and gold, and cells, many still containing prisoners. During the raids, Aum issued statements claiming that the chemicals were for fertilizers. Over the next six weeks, over 150 cult members were arrested for a variety of offenses. The media was stationed outside Aum's Tokyo headquarters on Komazawa Dori in Aoyama for months after the attack and arrests waiting for action and to get images of the cult's other members.

On 30 March 1995, Takaji Kunimatsu, chief of the National Police Agency, was shot four times near his house in Tokyo and was seriously wounded. While many suspected Aum involvement in the shooting, the Sankei Shimbun reported that Hiroshi Nakamura is suspected of the crime, but nobody has been charged.[37]

On 23 April 1995, Hideo Murai, the head of Aum's Ministry of Science, was stabbed to death outside the cult's Tokyo headquarters amidst a crowd of about 100 reporters, in front of cameras. The man responsible, a Korean member of Yamaguchi-gumi, was arrested and eventually convicted of the murder. His motive remains unknown.

On the evening of 5 May, a burning paper bag was discovered in a toilet in Tokyo's busy Shinjuku station. Upon examination it was revealed that it was a hydrogen cyanide device which, had it not been extinguished in time, would have released enough gas into the ventilation system to potentially kill 10,000 commuters.[32] Several undetonated cyanide devices were found at other locations in the Tokyo subway.

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[Grab the Gauge]

Recruitment Material

[Odin]

[Odin]

[Dick]

Lol the dude is obviously "jumping" by using his ass.

[sean]

It was a proxy terrorist group that was funded by North Korea and Russia. They tried to use them as a scapegoat to destabilise Japan. The largest branch of the religion outside Japan was in Russia, and several of them tried to purchase Russian weaponry in bulk. Several high ranking officers also had connections with North Korea and its alleged that they got the knowledge to create Sarin gas from them.

Bill Clinton barred them from entry into the United States when he was President. They were placed on the FBI terror watch list in 1995 and barred from travel. This was 2 years after the truck bomb in the basement of the World Trade Center, a year after a small plane crashed into the white house, during the Unabomber search (he wasn't caught until the following year), and just before the string of anthrax-by-mail stuff.

The FBI and the Clinton Administration were quick to cut travel for specific groups. But slow to implement countermeasures or allocate resources for prevention. It was all reactive talk, but no substance.