Cult May Have Planned to Use Gas in U.S. : Japan: Report suggests ‘intelligence chief’ made proposal. Sect is said to be suspected of killing dowager.

The cult suspected in the lethal nerve gas attack on Tokyo’s subways may have discussed using the gas in the United States, a news report Saturday quoted police as saying.

NHK public television said the cult’s chief doctor, Ikuo Hayashi, confessed to police that sect’s “chief of intelligence” said last November that he wanted to mail a package of the gas--sarin--to the United States.

The intelligence chief, Yoshihiro Inoue, wanted Hayashi to go there to receive the parcel, NHK quoted police as saying. The plan didn’t materialize.

Also Saturday, the Kyodo news agency reported that the cult, known as Aum Supreme Truth, is suspected of killing a follower’s grandmother by lethal injection in order to seize her estate.

The woman, 81 when she died in April last year, had a weak heart and was advised by her grandson, a member of the cult, to move from the clinic where she was being treated to a cult hospital.

Based on evidence from followers arrested after the March 20 gas attack, which killed 12 people and sickened 5,500 others, police suspect she died from a lethal injection by cult doctors, Kyodo said.

The cause of her death was listed as “heart failure.” Until the testimony about drug injections, it had been thought she died after cult therapy involving repeated immersion in hot water, Kyodo said.

Land and a condominium in Tokyo owned by the woman were donated to the cult just before her death and registered as its property shortly afterward, it said.

Their value combined with donations from her grandson totaled about $3.5 million.

Tokyo police, who have avoided official statements on much of the investigation, declined to comment on either report.