Barry Bearak JAPAN: SEC TS DENIAL -- The group formerly known as Aum Shinrikyo said it does not have access to sensitive information on government and corporate computer networks, although it was affiliated with companies that developed software for many of those systems.
"Aum knows that it cannot escape the introduction of the new law, and this is their way of trying to avoid it," said Shoko Egawa, a freelance journalist who is known for her coverage of Aum.
And last year came "Destroying the World to Save It: Aum Shinrikyo, Apocalyptic Violence and the New Global Terrorism," about the fanatical Japanese cult (Metropolitan Books).
Fumihiro Joyu, the group's charismatic former spokesman who is now its second-highest official, extended his apologies to victims of crimes linked to Aum and said it would compensate them through sales of real estate and other assets.
Takahashi's arrest will close a significant chapter in the Aum saga but it will be some time before Japan fully recovers from the national trauma created by the gas attacks.
The book explores all the expected topics (Soviet and Iraqi bioweapon factories; the forays into bioterror by groups like Japan's Aum cult), but it is particularly revelatory about the history of American germ-warfare efforts, which were reduced though not eliminated by the 1972 treaty banning them, and about more recent attempts to raise this country's military and civil preparedness.
The Aum Affair, as it is commonly referred to in Japan, seeded a culture of fear in one of the world's safest societies.
Beleaguered Aum numbers its membership merely in the thousands; Falun Gong, the Chinese movement so big that it has attracted a government ban, is estimated to have as many as seventy million followers.
In the months leading up to the Tokyo subway attack, Aum stepped up its VX attacks, spreading it on car door handles, injecting it into keyholes and spraying it from syringes onto lawyers, members of Aum victims groups, rival religious leaders and other dissident cult members.
It separately emerged that Aum had recruited into its ranks two nuclear engineers from the former Soviet Union.
