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Fifteen years after his conviction, Shoko Asahara founder and leader of the supreme sect of the Japanese Truth, was executed by hanging as responsible for the lethal gas attack of Sarin in the subway of Tokyo in 1995. Six people related to the cult were also executed.
The man, whose real name is Chizuo Matsumoto, planned in the 1990s a series of attacks that resulted in the death of 29 people. The best known is the Tokyo metro in March 1995, when five members of the group entered the suburbs of the Japanese capital at rush hour and, in a coordinated manner, drilled with their umbrellas several bags of sarin gas. The attack killed 13 people and injured more than 6,200, some of whom had lifelong scars.
A year earlier, in June 1994, other members of the sect released this same nerve agent into a parking lot in Matsumoto City, Nagano Province. The poison, manufactured by the organization itself, killed eight people and injured hundreds of others.
Asahara, then a charismatic guru followed by thousands of people in Japan, was arrested two months after the Tokyo bombing. After a first trial that lasted eight years, in 2004, he was convicted of 13 counts and sentenced to death.
The court then stated that " the motivation and purpose of his crimes were scandalous and ridiculous at the same time, while he was trying to control Japan in the name of salvation."
Asahara, Virtually blind since childhood, he gained disciples in an era of economic boom in the country, where many young people sought a spiritual refuge in a growing culture based on consumption and success. With his characteristic beard and long hair, he presented himself as a kind of God among his disciples, to whom he promised to bring them to salvation before a so-called apocalypse.
Many young people who followed him, including doctors and scientists, even cut ties with their family, gave their money to the group and lived in the sect's facilities, which went from a simple yoga school to a perfectly organized group capable of performing terrorist acts. Another crime was the 1989 murder of a lawyer who helped parents release their children from the yoke of the supreme Truth. Five members of the group, under the orders of Asahara, entered his home and strangled him with his wife and baby.
Prosecutors concluded that Asahara had led the organization to commit terrorist acts of this nature. The extent of revenge after he tried to enter politics and won no seat in the parliamentary elections of the year 1990.
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