Japan Executes All Remaining Ex-Aum Members on Death Row

July 26, 2018

Tokyo- Japan's Justice Ministry on Thursday executed all of the six remaining former senior members of the doomsday cult Aum Shinrikyo on death row.

The executions followed the July 6 hangings of Aum leader Chizuo Matsumoto, 63, who also went by the pseudonym of Shoko Asahara, and six other former senior members of the cult, which committed a series of deadly crimes, including the 1995 sarin nerve gas attack on Tokyo's subway system.

All 13 convicted former Aum members on death row have now been executed.

"The unprecedented and extremely heinous crimes should never be repeated," Justice Minister Yoko Kamikawa told a press conference. "I ordered the executions after careful consideration."

The former Aum members executed Thursday were Yasuo Hayashi, 60, Satoru Hashimoto, 51, Toru Toyoda, 50, Kenichi Hirose, 54, Kazuaki Okazaki, 57, and Masato Yokoyama, 54. Hayashi changed his family name to Koike and Okazaki to Miyamae after their arrests.

Hashimoto, Toyoda and Hirose were executed at the Tokyo Detention House, Okazaki and Yokoyama in Nagoya and Hayashi in Sendai.

Hayashi, Toyoda, Hirose and Yokoyama released sarin in Tokyo subway trains, while Hashimoto and Okazaki were involved in the 1989 murder of the family of lawyer Tsutsumi Sakamoto.

Kamikawa ordered all of the 13 Aum-related death-row inmates' executions. She has ordered a total of 16 condemned convicts to be hanged, the largest number for any Japanese justice minister.

Since the Justice Ministry started disclosing the facts of executions in November 1998, it was the first time that executions were held multiple times in a month.

According to final court rulings and other sources, Matsumoto, in collusion with the former senior Aum members, murdered Sakamoto, his wife and his child in November 1989, carried out a sarin gas attack in Matsumoto, Nagano Prefecture, central Japan, in June 1994 and released sarin on the Tokyo subway system in March 1995. The Matsumoto sarin attack left eight local residents dead, while the sarin released in the subway trains claimed the lives of 13 people. Jiji Press