After Shoko Asahara – the leader of the Japanese doomsday cult Aum Shinrikyo – and seven other members were executed in Japan earlier this month for orchestrating and carrying out the sarin gas terrorist attack on the Tokyo subway back in 1995, the remaining six members of the notorious cult who were on death row have also been executed today.
The execution of Satoru Hashimoto, Yasuo Koike (Hayashi), Kenichi Hirose, Kazuaki Okazaki (Miyamae), Toru Toyota and Masato Yokoyama was handed down after the group’s final appeal was dismissed earlier this year.
The group was sentenced to death row for the murder of the Sakamoto family in 1989 and the 1995 sarin gas attack – seen as the country’s biggest terrorist attack to date.
Death row execution is a rare occurrence in Japanese criminal law, considering the last death row execution was back in 2008, and the country very rarely conducts two executions in short succession like this.
The doomsday cult at its peak claimed to have approximately 40,000 members across Japan and Russia, and now is survived in multiple splinter groups that are heavily monitored by authorities.
