Tokyo subway sarin gas attack
| Tokyo subway sarin attack 地下鉄サリン事件 |
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|---|---|
Kasumigaseki Station, one of the many stations affected during the attack
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| Location | Tokyo, Japan |
| Date | March 20, 1995 7:00–8:10 a.m. (UTC+9) |
| Target | Tokyo subway |
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Attack type
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Chemical warfare |
| Weapon | Sarin |
| Deaths | 12 |
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Non-fatal injuries
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4,000+ a |
| Perpetrators | Aum Shinrikyo |
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No. of participants
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10 |
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a 17 critical (some later died), 50 severe, 984 temporary vision problems.
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The Tokyo subway sarin attack, usually referred to in the Japanese media as the Subway Sarin Incident (地下鉄サリン事件? Chikatetsu Sarin Jiken), was an act of domestic terrorism perpetrated on March 20, 1995, in Tokyo, Japan, by members of the cult movement Aum Shinrikyo.
In five coordinated attacks, the perpetrators released sarin on three lines of the present-day Tokyo Metro (then part of the Tokyo subway) during rush hour, killing 12 people, severely injuring 50 and causing temporary vision problems for nearly 5,000 others. The attack was directed against trains passing through Kasumigaseki and Nagatachō, home to the Japanese government. Until the Myojo 56 building fire on September 1, 2001, it was the deadliest incident to occur in Japan since the end of World War II.
Aum Shinrikyo is the former name of a controversial group now known as "Aleph". In 1992, Shoko Asahara, the founder of Aum Shinrikyo, published a book in which he declared himself "Christ", Japan's only fully enlightened master and identified with the "Lamb of God". He outlined a doomsday prophecy, which included a Third World War, and described a final conflict culminating in a nuclear "Armageddon", borrowing the term from the Book of Revelation 16:16. His purported mission was to take upon himself the sins of the world, and he claimed he could transfer to his followers spiritual power and ultimately take away their sins and bad works. He also saw dark conspiracies everywhere promulgated by Jews, Freemasons, the Dutch, the British Royal Family, and rival Japanese religions. Initially, the Japanese police reported the attack as the cult's way of hastening an apocalypse. The prosecution said that it was an attempt to bring down the government and install Shoko Asahara, the group's founder, as the "emperor" of Japan. Asahara's defense team claimed that certain senior members of the group independently planned the attack, but their motives for this were left unexplained.
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