Ex-Sect Member Sentenced for Japan Slayings

A former member of a doomsday group blamed for a 1995 nerve gas attack on the Tokyo subway was sentenced to death Friday for the slayings of four people, including a 1-year-old boy.

Kazuaki Okazaki, 38, a onetime leader of the Aum Supreme Truth sect, was convicted of killing an anti-cult lawyer and his family. He was also convicted of a separate attack in which he killed a wayward sect member.

In issuing the ruling, the Tokyo District Court said Okazaki deserved the death penalty because of the brutality of the crimes. Before the verdict, the severest penalty an Aum Supreme Truth sect member had received was life in prison.

Okazaki and four other top sect members strangled lawyer Tsutsumi Sakamoto, his wife and their infant son Nov. 4, 1989, at their home in Yokohama, just south of Tokyo, at the direction of sect leader Shoko Asahara, police say.

In Friday’s ruling, Judge Megumi Yamamuro acknowledged Asahara’s role in ordering the killings of the Sakamotos, Kyodo News agency reported.

Asahara, who is accused of masterminding the March 1995 subway attack that killed 12 people and sickened thousands, is being tried separately, as are the four other sect members accused in the Sakamoto killings.

Sakamoto was preparing a lawsuit against the sect when he was killed, accusing it of luring youngsters into the group. The bodies of the Sakamoto family, buried by sect members in remote mountains of central Japan, were not discovered until after the Tokyo gas attack.

Okazaki was also found guilty of murdering a sect member who tried to quit the religious group in February 1989.