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Aum also appears to engage in the classic--and lucrative--cult practice of taking over its members' financial assets. One 35-year-old who has since left the group says that when he became a devout follower, he was required to surrender his passport to the group and donate all his cash and belongings. He also recounts working under near slave-labor conditions at a sect project on the southern island of Kyushu. "Their strategy is to wear you down and take control of your mind," he says. "They promise you heaven, but they make you live in hell."
That speaker, who will not give his name, has worked with the Lawyers' Group on Behalf of the Victims of Aum Shinrikyo, one of the organizations founded to oppose the cult. It was formed in memory of the first people Aum may have kidnapped. In June 1989, an attorney named Tsutsumi Sakamoto took on the case of a family trying to locate their child, who had joined Aum. Five months later Sakamoto, his wife and infant son disappeared.
The case was never solved, but it cast a shadow over the organization. Last February 68-year-old Kiyoshi Kariya tried to prevent his cult-member sister, a wealthy widow, from giving Aum the building in which his office was located. The sister disappeared, and shortly afterward an Aum member questioned Kariya on her whereabouts. On Feb. 28, four young men jumped out of a Mitsubishi van and grabbed him. He has not been seen since. When police found a similar van with traces of Kariya's blood in it and the fingerprints of sect members, they issued a warrant for the arrest of a high-ranking cultist.
By then the cult had conceived a disquieting fascination with sarin. In 1991 Aum was involved in a land dispute in the city of Matsumoto. Last June the hearings had been completed, and a three-judge panel was about to rule; but three weeks before their decision was due, someone released a cloud of sarin, a substance more usually associated with national arsenals and weapons treaties, into the Matsumoto night. Seven people were killed and 200 injured; of the three judges, all of whom were sleeping in the affected area, all required treatment, and one was hospitalized. There has been no decision to date.
Police named a suspect in the Matsumoto sarin case, but dismissed him; no one was ever charged. That did not comfort Aum's nervous neighbors in Kamikuishiki. A month later they noticed that the leaves on the trees near the cult's compound had suddenly turned brown. Shortly afterward the family living nearest the compound woke up with nausea and sore eyes. There was "a horrible smell, like burning plastic," said retired farmer Norie Okamoto, who informed the police. The cultists got off with a warning, and the villagers were furious, especially when the Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper disclosed that police samples of the soil around the compound contained organic phosphorus compounds that are potential residues of sarin, matching residues in Matsumoto--and now those found in the Tokyo subway.
Even before the Matsumoto poisonings, sarin had become a staple of Asahara's rhetoric. A cult publication quotes a March 1994 sermon to his chapter in Kochi: "The law in an emergency is to kill one's opponent in a single blow, for instance the way research was conducted on soman [another Nazi gas] and sarin during World War II." He regularly charged that the U.S. was using the toxic chemical against him and his followers.