October 31, 1995
Web posted at: 9:15 a.m. EST (1415 GMT)
From Correspondent Mark Feldstein
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- A Senate subcommittee begins hearings Tuesday on the global proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. Its main focus: Japan's Aum Shinri Kyo doomsday cult. That group is accused of unleashing a deadly nerve gas attack on Tokyo's subways that killed 12 and injured more than 5,000 last March. It was the world's first mass-scale chemical terrorist attack. Authorities say Shoko Asahara, Aum Shinri Kyo's leader, was the mastermind.
A Tokyo District Court judge ruled Monday that the Aum Shinri Kyo cult should lose the tax and legal privileges accorded to religious groups because its members used cult facilities to make nerve gas. The move clears the way for the government to seize the cult's assets.
New information is coming to light about how the cult acquired technology from the United States to produce biological and chemical weapons. American investigators say the cult recruited scientists to help with weapons technology, and cult officials operated out of a mid-town New York apartment building, allegedly to beef up membership.
"It looks like their main effort in the U.S. was not membership but rather scientific-type equipment that would help them in producing chemical weapons, biological weapons and perhaps even nuclear weapons," said Sen. Sam Nunn, a member of the Armed Services Committee.
Some of that equipment included computer chips and lasers. In San Francisco, U.S. Customs seized a shipment of 400 gas masks bound for cult leaders in Japan a few weeks before the poison gas attack hit Tokyo. "These are Israeli-made military masks that have been certified to protect an individual from nerve gas attacks," said U.S. Customs official Wayne Yamashita. The masks "required a State Department license, which was not obtained in this case."
Authorities say they don't know all of the equipment the cult bought in the United States. "They purchased somewhere in the neighborhood of around $100 million worth of items from U.S. vendors over the 10 years or so that they were in operation," said Kyle Olson, an expert on chemical warfare who has been investigating the cult.
American investigators estimate Aum Shinri Kyo's membership at more than 40,000 worldwide, and its assets at more than $1 billion. They say the sect had infiltrated Japanese industry and law enforcement, and planned to assassinate government leaders next month, when President Clinton will be in Japan. The cult's ultimate goal: to promote a war between the United States and Japan, allowing it to take power in the aftermath.
"We know they were making chemical weapons. We know they were in the process of making biological weapons, which are even more frightening, but what we don't know is whether there are other groups out there like this," Nunn said. "I think this is a case study of the kinds of threats we're going to have in the future and therefore the kind of threat we have to prepare for."
But the United States is not ready, according to an internal report by the government's office of emergency preparedness. "It is unlikely that any city or state will be able to cope with major terrorism with large explosives or weapons of mass destruction," the report says. "(Federal) preparedness is insufficient to meet the threat."
"We don't even really have the capability now of detecting biological weapons," Olson said. "If they were to be used against us, we would not know about it until people started to drop dead."
This problem is likely to be addressed by the Senate Governmental Affairs permanent investigations subcommittee during its hearings this week.
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