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The government took two days to plan its counterattack. Early Wednesday morning, observed on television by a transfixed public, Japan's national police deployed 2,500 troops to the doors of 25 Aum Shinrikyo offices around the country. Officially they were investigating the February kidnapping of the 68-year-old manager of a notary public office suspected of having been spirited away by the cult. But the gas masks and the birds betrayed their real concerns.
As it turned out, those precautions were not necessary. Cult members appeared to know the police were coming. Before the troops approached the main compound at Kamikuishiki, 110 miles west of Tokyo, the faithful swept searchlights over the grounds. When the siege force reached a makeshift barricade at the entrance, a young man shouted, "The Aum Supreme Truth has nothing to hide! It is an unjust search, but we will cooperate!"
What the investigators found first was bizarre. Inside the compound were 50 small cubicles, each containing a cult member lying on a blanket. All were suffering from malnutrition, but most claimed they were fasting voluntarily, and only six of the most seriously wasted were hospitalized. Another young woman was reportedly lifted from inside a small windowless container in which she had been confined since mid-January. The only arrests the police made were of three doctors on the premises and a cult official, on suspicion of unlawful confinement.
Then the police made a yet more dramatic discovery. In a warehouse down a hill from the group's living quarters, they uncovered vast quantities of toxic chemicals, among them many of the constituent ingredients of sarin. Cult members insisted the chemicals were for such legitimate purposes as making pottery and processing semiconductors for a cult-owned business. Says Kenji Mori, a professor of organic chemistry at the University of Tokyo who has visited the compound: "Logically that may be so, but the volume of ingredients makes the place look more like a chemical factory than a religious compound." The police apparently suspected it looked like something more sinister still; on Thursday they announced for the first time that they wanted to question the guru about the subway attack.
By now Aum Shinrikyo's lawyers were in full cry. On Tuesday Asahara had released two radio messages through intermediaries. In one he repeated, "I didn't do it. I'm innocent" over and over again in a singsong voice. In the other he exhorted, "Disciples, the time to awaken and help me is upon you. Let's carry out the salvation plan and face death without regrets." His attorney was less cosmic in his approach. Maintained Yoshinobu Aoyama: "We practice our religion on the basis of Buddhist doctrines such as no killing, so it is impossible that we are responsible. In my personal view, sarin could not be made by those other than special persons like those in the U.S. military. I speculate that someone in the military and state authorities may have been involved." He called the raids "unprecedented religious persecution."