The Tokyo High Court on Thursday upheld the death sentence on former senior AUM Shinrikyo cultist Seiichi Endo for killing 19 people and trying to kill others in the 1994-1995 sarin gas attacks by producing the nerve agent as a key architect of the cult's chemical weapons development program. Endo, 46, was sentenced to death by the Tokyo District Court in October 2002 for the two sarin gas attacks and for a murder attempt in 1994 on a lawyer with sarin and of another attempt to kill a man with VX nerve gas, and had appealed the ruling.The 1995 sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway system left 12 people dead and thousands injured, and the 1994 sarin attack in Matsumoto, Nagano Prefecture, killed seven and injured 144.
"The subway sarin incident was an atrocious and vicious act of violence that was dangerous and unprecedented in our country's crime history," Presiding Judge Osamu Ikeda said in dismissing Endo's appeal. "The defendant Endo was proactively involved in sarin production and his criminal responsibility is in no way lighter than that of others who carried out the crime."
The defense had argued that the death sentence was too severe as Endo, although he produced weapons, had been brainwashed by AUM founder Shoko Asahara, 52, whose real name is Chizuo Matsumoto, and was not involved in executing the subway attack. Thirteen people have been given death sentences for the series of AUM crimes, and two of those have exhausted all avenues of appeal -- Asahara and Kazuaki Okazaki, a senior member convicted of murdering a lawyer and his family and an AUM follower in 1989. Appeals against the death sentences are under way for nine others at the Supreme Court and one -- by senior member Tomomasa Nakagawa -- is being heard at the Tokyo High Court.