Japan Shooting Called Challenge to State

As this nation’s top police official recovers from being shot four times by a mystery gunman earlier this week, Japan is still reeling from this year’s unrelenting episodes of violent crime and natural disaster.

Home Affairs Minister Hiromu Nonaka on Friday called the assassination attempt on the chief of the National Police Agency, Takaji Kunimatsu, 57, “a challenge against the state and democracy and a disgrace in front of the world.”

Police have launched a giant manhunt for the assailant, who fled by bicycle after the Thursday attack; key public officials have been assigned bodyguards. In an unprecedented move, Cabinet ministers have been urged to curtail public appearances.

Because Kunimatsu heads the investigation of the March 20 nerve gas attack in Tokyo subways, an inquiry that has centered on the Aum Supreme Truth religious group, the sect has also come under suspicion in his shooting.

Anonymous telephone calls to Tokyo television stations have asserted that Supreme Truth ambushed Kunimatsu and that other police officials will be targeted unless police cease their raids on the cult’s rural compound.

Aum representatives, however, have emphatically denied any involvement.

Kunimatsu is also orchestrating a stringent crackdown on organized crime groups and gun smuggling, so gang members are suspected as well.

Police said Friday that hitting the police chief from nearly 75 feet away with four of four shots indicated the work of a professional.

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The blazing headline of one tabloid here had a tidy solution to the whodunit: “Aum hires gangster to shoot police chief.”

Recovering from the blow to their prestige from not being able to protect their own top official, police redoubled efforts in their investigation of Supreme Truth members’ alleged connection to the subway gas attack, which killed 10 and afflicted more than 5,000.

That incident came two months after a temblor in Kobe that killed more than 5,000 and raised concerns about quake preparedness.

Critics charge that authorities should have acted earlier against the sect, which is also suspected of kidnaping and plotting murder.

Police on Friday distributed an internal document ordering officers nationwide to “root out” Supreme Truth followers “utilizing all possible laws,” the Nihon Keizai Shimbun reported.

Authorities seemed to seize the opportunity, arresting two sect disciples for having an expired auto inspection certificate and stopping two others for driving a van with an out-of-town license plate.

The men in the van, also sect members, were arrested after police found boxes of sodium, which can be used for making explosives.

Police also raided two branches of the group in Fukuoka after a former member complained that he had been forcibly detained.

In the continuing investigation of the sect’s Kamikuishiki compound, in the shadow of Mt. Fuji, police turned up 40 types of chemicals, including some ingredients for sarin nerve gas. The hundreds of drums of chemicals in the sect’s stockpile could produce about 5.6 tons of sarin, the police say.

Sect members say the chemicals were not intended to destroy the world but to help rebuild it after the 1997 holocaust their leader has predicted. Meantime, they say, the chemicals are used as fertilizer, pottery glaze and in the manufacture of computer chips.