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DENVER - A Japanese cult attacked Tokyo in 1993 with an innocuous, readily available strain of anthrax sold by a Colorado animal vaccine company, an Arizona researcher said. The anthrax was used by the Aum Shinri Kyo doomsday cult that in 1995 used sarin nerve gas to kill 12 people in an attack on a Tokyo subway station. Paul Keim, an anthrax expert at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, told colleagues about the 1993 anthrax attack at Sunday's session of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (news - web sites) convention in Denver. Using DNA, researchers at the...

AUM founder Asahara found guilty of all 13 charges TOKYO, Feb. 27, Kyodo - (EDS: UPDATING WITH INCLUSION OF 1995 SARIN GAS ATTACK, LAWYERS' STATEMENT) Shoko Asahara, the founder of the AUM Shinrikyo cult, is guilty of all 13 charges against him, including the 1995 sarin gassing on the Tokyo subway system, the Tokyo District Court ruled Friday. The guilty verdicts handed down against the 48-year-old guru boost the likelihood of a death penalty since any one of the cases carries a death penalty. Asahara, whose real name is Chizuo Matsumoto, faced charges in 13 criminal cases that resulted...

Feb. 22, 2004 | TOKYO (AP) -- As guru of a doomsday cult, Shoko Asahara looked and sounded the part. Almost blind, his black beard flowing onto his chest, he claimed he could levitate, see into people's past lives and foretell the apocalypse. On Friday, a Japanese court will decide whether he also commanded his disciples to murder, most terrifyingly in the 1995 sarin nerve gas attack on the Tokyo subway that killed 12 people, sickened thousands and alerted the world to the threat of terrorism by mass slaughter. Asahara faces the gallows if convicted of masterminding the subway deaths...

Fears grow that extremists are ready to cross another threshold of terror Evidence gathered in Iraq and Afghanistan lends credence to claims that radical Islamic groups are dabbling in lethal toxins BEIRUT: A few days ago, Japanese prosecutors demanded the death sentence for the guru of the Aum Shinrikyo (Supreme Truth) doomsday cult, Shoko Asahara, for masterminding the sarin gas attack on Tokyo’s subway system on March 20, 1995. Twelve people were killed and 2,500 sickened. A year earlier, sect activists had released sarin in a residential neighborhood in the Nagano Mountains, killing seven people. Those atrocities crossed a moral...