Leaflets Threaten More Gas Attacks in Tokyo : Japan: U.S. Embassy issues warning. Police continue to find huge caches of chemicals.

As police raids on the secretive religious sect Aum Supreme Truth continued to turn up huge caches of chemicals Friday, police warned that anonymous leaflets had threatened further toxic gas attacks in Tokyo.

Police said they have confiscated several hundred tons of chemical agents, including ingredients for dynamite, in three days of raids on facilities of the cult.

The raids are officially linked to kidnaping investigations but also are clearly related to suspicions that the sect may have been behind Monday’s poison gas terror attack in the Tokyo subway system, which killed 10 and afflicted more than 5,000.

The U.S. Embassy today released a statement warning of possible new terror attacks. Japanese police “are investigating the anonymous distribution of leaflets throughout the public train and subway system (that) threaten further toxic gas attacks at 25 locations,” the embassy said.

The leaflets threaten attacks on “university campuses, entertainment centers, department stores and train lines,” it added. “Although there is no hard evidence that would indicate additional incidents of this kind . . . increased security remains a prudent, pro-active measure.”

*

Cult leader Shoko Asahara, speaking in a videotape shown Friday at 36 local Aum chapters, accused the U.S. Army of attacking his group with poison gas.

“I am seriously sick,” Asahara said, according to the Kyodo News Service. “Some 50% of my 1,700 pupils are troubled with sickness, as we have been sprayed with poisonous gases such as sarin and mustard gas. . . . The gas was sprayed by U.S. troops unmistakably.”

Asahara, who is wanted for questioning by the police, also sent a videotape out of his hiding place to quasi-governmental NHK Television, answering written questions. In that tape, which was aired Friday, Asahara said the chemicals found at sect facilities were used for making plastic, ceramics and pesticides, and he accused authorities of “bashing” the sect.

“I don’t understand how sarin could be produced by using these materials,” Asahara said. “Police are trying to damage our reputation.”

Yoshinobu Aoyama, the group’s lawyer and a sect member, also charged that Monday’s attack may have been masterminded by the United States.

“This is just speculation, but I think it’s the U.S. military or some organization like that,” Aoyama said in a televised interview Friday.

A U.S. Embassy spokesman responded: “The United States categorically rejects the charges, which are not worth comment.”

Aum Supreme Truth also staged a legal counteroffensive Friday by filing a lawsuit demanding compensation for the first day of police raids, alleging that they involved unnecessary property destruction.

In an indication that police had some advance idea of how serious a confrontation with the sect might become, a Japanese army spokesman said Friday that military officials had lent police several thousand gas masks and chemical warfare outfits and gave training in use of the gear on Sunday, the day before the subway attack.

Various Japanese media have reported that police had been planning a raid on sect facilities for many weeks, and that they feared there might be nerve gas in the cult’s compounds. The sect claims about 10,000 followers in Japan, of whom hundreds live at cult facilities, mostly in rural areas.

During a raid Friday in the city of Kofu, 75 miles west of Tokyo, large quantities of nitric acid and glycerin, chemicals used in the making of nitroglycerin, were found in a warehouse leased by a female Aum member who ran a chemical wholesale business, Japanese media reported.

Police earlier this week had discovered a variety of other toxic chemicals at sect facilities, including some that can be used in the production of the deadly sarin nerve gas used in Monday’s attack.

Police said the Aum organization had set up a number of dummy retail companies for chemical pharmaceutical products, with cult members as executives. Aum Supreme Truth was apparently purchasing chemicals through these companies.

The sect has a history of hitting back at critics by filing lawsuits. In its suit filed against the Tokyo city government Friday, it charged that police acted unlawfully in raids on Aum facilities Wednesday. The lawsuit, which seeks $341,000 in compensation, alleges that police destroyed fixtures and illegally removed a door.

The National Police Agency, meanwhile, was preparing to submit legislation to Parliament that would strengthen legal restrictions on the production of sarin and other poisons.

Parliament is already expediting approval of a bill to ban chemical weapons and various poison substances, in connection with Japanese ratification of the international chemical weapons ban treaty.

But the police agency, according to Japanese media reports quoting political sources, will draft a separate bill that would provide tougher penalties than the law now before legislators.