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Police put together their picture of the group's plans from the interrogations of 34 senior cultists arrested since the subway attack. Asahara had long been predicting a 1997 world war in which the U.S.would try to take over Japan, and he was determined that the cult should survive it. By March 1994 that vision had altered dramatically. Asahara apparently had become interested less in surviving the war than in starting it, and for unexplained reasons he moved the timetable forward to 1995. He had funds -- a senior cult member admitted that Aum has assets of more than $1 billion -- and an inner circle of Ph.D.s that was split into groups to produce conventional arms, chemical weapons, biological weapons and drugs. The least successful initiative was germ research, even though Aum sent a medical team to Zaire in 1992 following mistaken reports of an outbreak of Ebola. The most successful was the sarin production unit. Chief chemist Masaya Tsuchiya, 30, told police that he concocted a total of 25 kg of sarin between November 1993 and the Tokyo attack. Details are fragmentary. Incomplete cult memos have been confiscated suggesting that Aum wanted to buy lasers, fighter jets and tanks. No police report has fully explained the March subway gassing and May's thwarted attack on Shinjuku station. Ikuo Hayashi, a doctor who admitted planting gas on one of the Tokyo trains, was quoted in newspapers as saying the goal was to wipe out the Kasumigaseki section of Tokyo, where many government offices are located. "The attack was launched so that the guru's prophecy could come true," Hayashi reportedly told interrogators.
Asahara is expected to be indicted this week for murder and attempted murder. Police are also preparing to charge the guru on suspicion of ordering the first sarin-gas attack in June last year in Matsumoto, in central Japan, which killed seven and injured more than 200. Meanwhile, his wife Tomoko Matsumoto, 36, is in the process of taking control of the group, which has yet to see major defections. Fear may be a factor: reports say Aum members under arrest have confessed that a cement-grinding machine found at the cult's main commune was used to pulverize the bones of members who died during initiation rites or were otherwise done away with.
But nothing in such disclosures, even in the immediate aftermath of the subway attack, could have prepared the Japanese for what police now believe. The man in the deep pink pajama suit seems to be the incarnation of that implausible villain in thriller novels: a megalomaniac who marshaled money, scientific expertise and loyal followers to act out his prophecies of doom and destruction.
--REPORTED BY IRENE M. KUNII/TOKYO