EXCLUSIVE: Aum Inmate Has No Special Feelings on Asahara’s Execution

August 19, 2018

Tokyo- Makoto Hirata, an imprisoned former executive of Aum Shinrikyo, has stated that he has "no special feelings" about the execution last month of Shoko Asahara, the former guru of the now-defunct Japanese doomsday cult responsible for a number of serious crimes.

Speaking to Jiji Press at a prison in the central Japan city of Shizuoka, where he is held, Hirata, 53, said, however, "I was lost for words" to hear that 12 other former senior Aum members were also hanged.

Hirata, who had been wanted for his suspected involvement in several Aum-related crimes, surrendered to police on Dec. 31, 2011, after all criminal trials on a series of cases linked to the cult, including the March 1995 sarin nerve gas attack on Tokyo's subway system, which killed 13 people and injured more than 6,000 others, were once completed.

During his trial, Hirata called for the 12 former senior Aum members, excluding Asahara, whose real name was Chizuo Matsumoto, not to be executed.

The Justice Ministry executed the 13 last month--seven, including Asahara, 63, on July 6 and the other six on July 26--finishing the executions of all Aum members on death row.

"I doubt whether it was really good to execute the members, even apart from my personal feelings for them," Hirata said, stressing that the country should have utilized lessons from what they did in future counterterrorism measures.

Asked whether his surrender to the police at the end of 2011 affected the timing of the executions of the 13 death-row inmates, Hirata said: "If I didn't show up, the executions could have been carried out earlier or might have been put off. I have no idea about it."

Three successor groups to Aum, including Aleph, are active at present.

Noting that people who joined Aum or the successor groups after the series of crimes committed by Aum have no experience of directly meeting Asahara, Hirata said he thinks that Asahara is "a fictitious person" and merely a symbol for them. "I think the execution (of Asahara) has little impact" on members of the successor groups, he said.

In March 2014, Tokyo District Court sentenced Hirata to nine years in prison on charges including abduction and confinement for his involvement in cases such as the kidnapping of a Tokyo notary public. His prison sentence was finalized at the Supreme Court in January 2016. Jiji Press