13 doomsday cultists behind a deadly 1995 Tokyo subway sarin attack now face sudden hanging in what could be Japan’s largest mass execution in 10 years, The Guardian reported.
Speculation on the hangings rose last week after several members of the Aum Shinrikyo cult group, responsible for killing 13 people and sickening thousands in the sarin nerve gas attack 23 years ago, were transferred to detention facilities outside of Tokyo.
In Japan, those on death row are not usually executed until all accomplices’ cases are finalized, which happened in January. It’s also customary there to keep information of pending executions secret, even to prisoners and their family members, until the day of their deaths, ABC News reported.
Reacting to speculation, The Japan Society for Cult Prevention and Recovery (JSCPR) demanded that the state refrain from executing the former cult members, and submitted a petition to the Justice Ministry requesting that their lives be spared, The Japan Times reported.
Taro Takimoto, a JSCPR board member who survived an attack from Aum Shinrikyo members in 1994, reasoned that the cultists were under the influence of the group’s leader, Shoko Asahara, who is also on death row but has yet to be moved.
“Asahara was the brain and the others were merely the limbs,” said Takimoto.
Amnesty International spoke out against the executions, saying that Japan’s government was looking to initiate the hangings before the 2020 Tokyo Games as a way of getting “negative stories” out of the way so that “future celebrations need not be overshadowed.
“Organizers of the Tokyo Games want to ‘advance measures that will leave lasting legacies for future generations,’” said Amnesty east Asia researcher Hiroka Shoji.
“It is time for the Japanese people to reconsider if the country wants to leave a legacy of brutality for the next generation. State-sanctioned killing is cruel and inhuman regardless, but for the executions to happen now, ahead of next year when the world will have its eyes on Japan would demonstrate an unprecedented level of cynicism and a chilling disregard for human life.”
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