Japan AUM cult web archive opens ahead of sarin attack’s 30th anniv.
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The Japanese government has opened a new website on the AUM Shinrikyo doomsday cult responsible for the Tokyo subway nerve gas attack nearly 30 years ago, featuring testimonies from victims’ families and photos of the group’s guru as part of efforts to keep memories alive.
The Public Security Intelligence Agency’s digital archive also offers access to recordings of police radio communications at the tense moment of the sarin attack on March 20, 1995. With 14 people killed and over 6,000 injured, it became the worst terror incident on Japanese soil.
Through the archive, the agency hopes to alert people to the risks associated with the cult, which remains active through successor groups such as “Aleph” and continues to recruit new members, especially younger people.
AUM Shinrikyo is “by no means an issue of the past,” Justice Minister Keisuke Suzuki told a press conference Friday announcing the opening of the website. His ministry oversees the Public Security Intelligence Agency.
AUM Shinrikyo founder Shoko Asahara, whose real name was Chizuo Matsumoto, was executed at age 63 with 12 other former senior members of the cult in July 2018.
He was convicted of multiple murders including the 1995 attack and a 1994 sarin gas attack in Matsumoto, Nagano Prefecture, which killed eight people and injured more than 100. Cult members also murdered lawyer Tsutsumi Sakamoto, who was helping people break away from the cult, along with his wife and their baby son, in 1989.
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