Aum Shinrikyo

During the last decades, mass terrorism has developed into international terrorism. Known are transnational terrorist groupings, particularly Aum Shinrikyo , al Qaida and others, which are able to use any methods of mass terrorism to demolish people, animals, vegetation, stocks of materials and capital equipment. 

As discussed above, several states that support terrorism have some CBRN capabilities, so the technical constraint alone is not limiting. Rather, the potential backlash against any state that provides a terrorist organization with CBRN has been a sufficient deterrent to this point. However groups such as al Qaeda, Aum Shinrikyo, and the Tamil Tigers have shown significant interest in one or more types of unconventional weapons. 

Despite significant interest in unconventional weapons, there have been few instances of widespread death or incapacitation due to CBRN use by terrorists, and the number of casualties pales in comparison to those killed by more conventional explosives, armed attacks and arson. Since 1968, more than 14,000 people have been killed by bombing, and nearly 6,000 by armed attack, but CBRN attacks have accounted for less than 20 deaths [41]. The two most notorious unconventional attacks in modern history, Aum Shinrikyo s gassing of a Tokyo subway in 1995 and the anthrax attacks in the U.S. in the fall of 2001, killed a total of 17 people. The food poisoning by the Rajneeshees in Oregon in 1984 has also received much attention. While there were no fatalities when the cult poisoned several salad bars with Salmonella, there were more than 700 injuries. 

Kyodo News Service, Japan, Aum Shinrikyo Sets Up More Than 10 Business Entities April 16, 2004, available at www.religion newsblog.com/6796. 

Before the underground attack most Japanese citizens saw Aum Shinrikyo as an oddity, but few perceived them as a menace to society. The Japanese are renowned as a people of religious tolerance and were accustomed to sects advocating various paths to enlightenment and... 

On 27 June 1994 a truck left the Aum Shinrikyo compound for the city of Matsumoto. At 2200 hours the truck, customised to disperse poison gas, pulled into a supermarket car park and at 2240 hours started to spray 20 kg of liquid sarin into the night air, leaving the wind to disperse the agent. The evening was warm and seven residents had gone to bed... 

Aum Shrinrikyo s sarin nerve gas attack against Tokyo commuters led to a significant, and understandable, concern that terrorists might, from now onwards, use unconventional weapons. Certainly, if a tactic attracts widespread attention, other terrorists will usually want to imitate it.40 Three questions immediately present themselves then. Why would terrorists replicate Aum Shinrikyo s attack Who, among the spectrum of terrorist groups, would be the most likely to copy such an attack Why has the Aum Shinrikyo attack not been duplicated ... 

Note that the production facility declared by Japan was Satyam 7, located at Kamikuishiki, formerly used by the religious cult Aum Shinrikyo which released the nerve gas sarin on the Tokyo underground system on 20 March 1995. 

In the early 1990s, leaders of Aum Shinrikyo, the Japanese religious cult that in 1995 attacked riders on the Tokyo subway with a sarin nerve agent, made numerous trips to Russia.The group s leader in charge of weapons procurement made 21 trips to Russia between 1992 and 1995. Group leaders frequently met with senior government officials, such as the secretary of Russian Security Council, the Parliament speaker, and vice... 

Recent cases in which the barriers to the transfer of expertise have been evaded reveal that formal and government-approved contacts provide significant opportunities for diversion. These government-approved contacts have been much more common in state-to-state relationships. However, there was a brief period in the early 1990s when Aum Shinrikyo had extensive contacts with Russian politicians and personnel at scientific and military facilities. ... 

Cult members of the Aum Shinrikyo in Japan released sarin nerve agent on the subway in March 1995, killing a dozen people and causing more than a thousand injuries. In terms of its overall lethality, the use of nerve agent in this case was limited. But it certainly was a case of chemical terrorism. Similarly, looking at... 

Seto, Y., Tsunoda, N., Kataoka, M., Tsuge, K., Nagano, T. (2000). Toxicological analysis of victim s blood and crime scene evidence samples in the sarin gas attack caused by Aum Shinrikyo. National Research Institute of Police Science, Chiba, Japan. Unpublished manuscript. 

In June 1994 and again in May 1995 the Japanese cult group Aum Shinrikyo created much havoc when they released the deadly nerve agent sarin in two Japanese cities. In the first attack in Matsumoto, Japan, sarin vapor was released in a residential area where judges unfriendly to the cult resided. Seven people died as a consequence of this nerve agent exposure, and 500 people were injured. The 1995 attack occurred in the Tokyo subway system. Several coordinated releases of this potentially deadly vapor resulted in more than 5,000 visits to local emergency departments. Fortunately, the vast majority of exposed victims had few if any symptoms and there were only a handful of fatalities (Tucker, 2006 for further discussion, see chapter 19—Biological and Chemical Terrorism A Unique Threat). 

Terrorists have expressed an interest in nerve agents and have deployed them in attacks on unprotected civilians (Rotenberg and Newmark, 2003). A Japanese religious cult, Aum Shinrikyo, independently manufactured numerous chemical and biological agents. The first such attack with sarin occurred in Matsumoto in 1994 and the Tokyo subway in 1995. Thousands of people were affected and dozens of people died (Nagao et al, 1997 Ohtomi et al, 1996 Okumura et al, 1998 Yokoyama et al, 1998). In... 

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