Ex-NPA official regrets allowing Aum cult to ‘go on the offensive’
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A bureau chief who oversaw police investigations into Aum Shinrikyo said he feels responsible for the “indecision” on a crackdown that allowed the cult to commit its deadly gas attack in Tokyo in 1995.
According to Takashi Kakimi, who was at the time director-general of the Criminal Affairs Bureau of the National Police Agency, police were planning to search Aum Shinrikyo facilities in Tokyo and the village of Kamikuisshiki in Yamanashi Prefecture as early as March 22, 1995.
But on the morning of March 20 that year, Aum Shinrikyo members released sarin nerve gas on five trains on the Hibiya, Marunouchi and Chiyoda subway lines.
Fourteen people died and more than 6,000 were injured.
“Looking back, we could have chosen to carry out a search before completing investigations because there were suspicions that sarin existed (at Aum facilities),” Kakimi, 82, said in an interview with scholars, a journalist and an Asahi Shimbun reporter.
“Given the number of casualties, I still wonder if we could not have decided sooner on the search. I feel responsible for our indecision,” he said.
It is the first time that Kakimi discussed details of the overall investigations. He had remained almost silent on the issue after retiring from the NPA in August 1996.
Kakimi agreed to a series of interviews from May last year in response to a proposal from a legal scholar, his friend. Kakimi explained that he thought he is responsible for recording the police decisions for posterity.
Aum Shinrikyo clearly emerged on the radar of the Criminal Affairs Bureau after eight people were killed and more than 600 were injured in a sarin gas attack in Matsumoto, Nagano Prefecture, on June 27, 1994.
The NPA’s National Research Institute of Police Science reported on Nov. 16, 1994, that a breakdown product of sarin was discovered from soil around a cult facility in Kamikuisshiki.
Nine days later, the Criminal Affairs Bureau laid out a basic plan to search Aum Shinrikyo facilities.
Content retrieved from: https://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/15610830.
