Teenage Girl Takes Over Japan's Cult
November 2, 1998 - 0:0
TOKYO A 15-year-old girl has taken charge of Japan's secretive Aum Supreme Truth Doomsday Sect which carried out the deadly gas attack on the Tokyo subway, investigators say. She is at the top of the sect now, said a member of Japan's Public Security Agency, referring to Rika Matsumoto, third daughter of cult leader Shoko Asahara. It is absurd but they believe she is at a high spiritual stage because she was the first child of Asahara after he was `enlightened' in 1982, the investigator told AFP on condition of anonymity.
The teenager, who should be in school under Japanese law, is instead giving orders to top Aum disciples while her father is on trial in Tokyo District Court on 17 charges including murder, the security official said. She lives in a house in Asahi village, some 80 kilometers (45 miles) east of Tokyo where her father is in jail, and does not attend school because residents fear her contact with their children.
Local bureaucrats, who might otherwise take the child into care, do not want to touch her, the investigator said. The cult escaped being outlawed in January 1997 because a legal panel ruled there was insufficient reason to believe it was still a threat with only about 1,000 full and part-time members. Japanese authorities believe differently. More than 1,700 Public Security Agency investigators monitor the cult day and night after it released Nazi-invented sarin gas in Tokyo's subway in March 1995, killing 12 people and injuring thousands.
The cult maintains the same dangerous doctrine and is following the path it took in the past with the number of followers having grown back to more than 1,500 in Japan, said the investigator. Many of the cult's followers live in areas surrounding the Tokyo Detention Center that holds 43-year-old Asahara. The sect is regrouping, using funds from high-tech computer businesses, say officials.
Aum earns four billion yen ($35 million dollars) a year from its discount computer outlets, providing funds to sustain followers, expand business and buy housing, the Public Security Agency said. At one tiny computer shop in central Tokyo, identified by investigators as being owned by Aum, young women serve bargain hunters with cut-price parts and an offer to assemble computers to order within 90 minutes.
I know it's an Aum shop but what matters is the price, said Taka Ogawa, a 51-year-old engineer who spent $200 on a sound card and other components. Store clerks denied the shop was owned by the sect. (AFP)
The teenager, who should be in school under Japanese law, is instead giving orders to top Aum disciples while her father is on trial in Tokyo District Court on 17 charges including murder, the security official said. She lives in a house in Asahi village, some 80 kilometers (45 miles) east of Tokyo where her father is in jail, and does not attend school because residents fear her contact with their children.
Local bureaucrats, who might otherwise take the child into care, do not want to touch her, the investigator said. The cult escaped being outlawed in January 1997 because a legal panel ruled there was insufficient reason to believe it was still a threat with only about 1,000 full and part-time members. Japanese authorities believe differently. More than 1,700 Public Security Agency investigators monitor the cult day and night after it released Nazi-invented sarin gas in Tokyo's subway in March 1995, killing 12 people and injuring thousands.
The cult maintains the same dangerous doctrine and is following the path it took in the past with the number of followers having grown back to more than 1,500 in Japan, said the investigator. Many of the cult's followers live in areas surrounding the Tokyo Detention Center that holds 43-year-old Asahara. The sect is regrouping, using funds from high-tech computer businesses, say officials.
Aum earns four billion yen ($35 million dollars) a year from its discount computer outlets, providing funds to sustain followers, expand business and buy housing, the Public Security Agency said. At one tiny computer shop in central Tokyo, identified by investigators as being owned by Aum, young women serve bargain hunters with cut-price parts and an offer to assemble computers to order within 90 minutes.
I know it's an Aum shop but what matters is the price, said Taka Ogawa, a 51-year-old engineer who spent $200 on a sound card and other components. Store clerks denied the shop was owned by the sect. (AFP)