Matsumoto sarin attack

The sarin attack occurred in a quiet residential area in the city of Matsumoto, Nagano Prefecture. In carrying out the attack, Aum Shinrikyo had two goals; to attack three judges who were expected to rule against the cult in a lawsuit concerning a real estate dispute, and to test the efficacy of its sarin—which the cult was manufacturing at one of its facilities—as a weapon of mass murder. Residents of Matsumoto had also angered Aum founder Shoko Asahara by vigorously opposing his plan to set up an office and factory in the city's southern area. Opponents of the plan gathered 140,000 signatures on an anti-Aum petition, equivalent to 70 percent of Matsumoto's population at the time. Aum's original plan to release the aerosol into the Matsumoto courthouse was altered when the cult members arrived in the city after the courthouse had closed. They decided to instead target a three-story apartment building where the city's judges resided. At 10:40 pm, members of Aum used a converted refrigerator truck to release a cloud of sarin which floated near the home of the judges. The truck's cargo space held "a heating contraption that had been specifically designed to turn" twelve litres of liquid sarin into an aerosol, and fans to diffuse the aerosol into the neighbourhood. The fatalities included Yutaka Kobayashi, a 23-year-old salaryman, and Mii Yasumoto, a 29-year-old medical school student. == Investigation ==

Police received an anonymous tip implicating Aum after the attacks, but the cult was not officially implicated in the incident until after the later Tokyo subway sarin attack in 1995. One section of the tip read, "Matsumoto was definitely an experiment of sorts. The result of this experiment in an open space: seven dead, over 200 injured. If sarin is released in an enclosed space, say, a crowded subway it is easy to imagine a massive catastrophe." After the incident, police focused their investigation on Yoshiyuki Kōno, whose wife was a victim put in a coma by the aerosol. It was discovered that Kōno had stored a large amount of pesticide in his residence. Although it was later proven that sarin cannot be manufactured from pesticides, Keiichi Tsuneishi, a Japanese historian, claimed the nerve agent is synthesizable from organophosphorus pesticides, and Kōno was dubbed by some in the media "the Poison Gas Man". He subsequently received hate mail, death threats, and intense legal pressure. After the truth became known, every major Japanese newspaper apologized to Kōno, including those that had not named him as a suspect. After the Tokyo attack, the blame was shifted to the Aum Shinrikyo cult. Matsumoto's police chief, on behalf of the police department and media, publicly apologized to Kōno. Kōno's wife later awoke from her coma, but recovered neither speech nor body movement; she died in 2008. Several Aum members were found guilty of masterminding both incidents. Thirteen Aum members, including cult leader Shoko Asahara, were sentenced to death, and were executed in 2018. Combined, the attacks resulted in 21 deaths and thousands of hospitalizations and outpatient treatments. == References ==