Suffering from Aum Sarin Attack Still Continues: Victim’s Family Member

July 27, 2018

Tokyo- The suffering remains unhealed even following Thursday's executions of all of the six remaining former members of Japanese doomsday cult Aum Shinrikyo on death row for crimes, a family member of a victim said.

"The executions mark an end under the country's criminal justice system, but our suffering still continues," Shizue Takahashi, who lost her husband due to the cult's 1995 sarin nerve gas attack on Tokyo's subway system, said at a press conference.

Takahashi's husband, Kazumasa, was a subway worker.

Takahashi said she learned of the latest executions from television news when she was thinking about Toru Toyoda, who sprayed the nerve gas on the subway. "I was upset with the news and felt tense," she said. Toyoda, 50, is one of the six former Aum members executed Thursday.

Takahashi hoped to see Toyoda but the meeting did not happen.

"I wanted to tell him how victims' families feel about the sarin attack," she said. "I wanted to see him and talk."

Fusae Kobayashi, 76, who lost her 23-year-old second son in the cult's separate sarin gas attack in Matsumoto, Nagano Prefecture, central Japan, in 1994, said that the former Aum members on death row deserved to be executed.

"Even with the executions, my son isn't coming back," Kobayashi said.

Seven other former Aum members on death row, including founder and leader Chizuo Matsumoto, were executed on July 6. Kobayashi visited her son's grave at the time to report the executions.

"It took longer than my son lived before all of the former Aum members on death row were executed," she said.

Lawyer Taro Takimoto, who was hit in another sarin attack in 1994 by Aum, said "the execution of Matsumoto alone was good enough for a series of crimes committed by the cult."

"The 12 others, including those who tried to kill me, were working for the cult's guru," he said. Jiji Press