World Famous Cults and Fanatics (23 page)

More damningly, some now believe that the federal authorities deliberately murdered the Branch Davidians.
They point out that the CS tear gas fired into the building by the FBI tanks was not
only potentially lethal, it was also highly flammable.
The makers of CS gas specifically insist that it should never be used in confined spaces.
Unable to disperse in open air, it can cause fatal
poisoning (it contains cyanide).
Then, when it settles a short time after being released, CS gas forms a fine dust that burns very easily and rapidly.
When the fire started, every surface and
person within the compound would have had a dusting of this powder.

The nine surviving cultists have always maintained that there was no “suicide pact” among the Branch Davidians, and some even claimed that FBI snipers shot at them as they escaped,
preventing the others from leaving the building.
Indeed, infrared aerial footage, taken by the FBI during the fire, reveals weapon flashes going off outside the flaming compound.
On the other hand,
the survivors suggest, the only shooting done by the trapped cultists was to save each other and their children from being burned to death.

In August 1999, the FBI was forced to admit that ‘pyrotechnic tear gas canisters’ were fired into the Waco compound after the tanks had deployed the CS gas, but before the fire was
seen to start.
They flatly denied that these were responsible for starting the blaze, but the incendiaries certainly could have ignited the wooden, sun-dried, CS-powder-coated buildings.
At the
very least, the use of such weapons under such circumstances was highly questionable.

But why would the United States government ruthlessly murder over eighty adults and children?
The cultists claimed, during the siege and after, that gunmen in federal helicopters had fired
blindly through the roof of the building – if true, this was a blatant act of child endangerment (of the very children the FBI claimed to be so desperate to save).
Perhaps it was thought that
the only way to totally destroy the evidence of such a crime would be to burn the building – and its occupants.
The ATF also bulldozed what little was left of the compound before it could be
properly examined.
The head of the subsequent Senate investigation of the Waco siege, while exonerating the FBI, noted that getting the authorities to hand over evidence “was as difficult as
pulling teeth”.

Secondly, it has been claimed that the US government wanted to frighten the various groups, like the Branch Davidians, who espoused anti-federalist doctrines (Koresh said the federal government
was under the control of the Antichrist).
These anti-federal religious sects, “militias” and “patriot groups” had been rapidly growing up across the US since the mid-1980s,
and were no longer composed of just a few extremists and crazies.
Hundreds of thousands of ordinary, middle-class Americans, tired of big government and big business ruling their lives, had joined
or indirectly supported groups who were calling for an end to federal income tax and the dismantling of the monolithic federal government machine.

Those that believe the federal authorities were sending an intimidating message to these anti-federal groups – by slaughtering the Branch Davidians – point to the official title of
the attack that ended the Waco siege: it was called “Operation Showtime”.

Shoko Asahara and the Aum Shinrikyo

On 20 March 1995, soon after 7 a.m., commuters on the Tokyo subway began to experience a tickling in the throat and a soreness in the eyes and nose; soon they smelled a stench
like a mixture of mustard and burning rubber.
Within minutes, dozens of people were choking or falling to the ground.

It was happening all over the Tokyo underground system.
No one had any idea what was causing it.
Fleets of ambulances ferried gasping or unconscious passengers to hospitals – the figure
finally reached 5,500.
Many seemed to be paralysed, and a dozen would finally die.
Yet it was not until mid-morning that a military doctor made a cautious and incredible diagnosis: the victims were
suffering from poisoning by a nerve gas called sarin, once used by the Nazis in their death camps.

This was not the first such terrorist attack.
On 27 June 1994, in the city of Matsumoto, in the Nagano Prefecture, a similar sarin attack flooded the local hospital.
Fortunately the gas had been
released into the open air, so less people were affected, but seven died nonetheless.
The bemused authorities decided it was a matter for the local police only – a decisive factor in allowing
the Tokyo attack to take place.

After Tokyo, a national police investigation soon turned up a likely suspect: an immensely wealthy religious cult known as Aum Shinrikyo, or Aum Supreme Truth, led by a forty-year-old guru who
called himself Shoko Asahara.

During the past six months police had received dozens of phone calls accusing the cult of fraud, abduction, and brutality.
Things had come to a head a month earlier, when a sixty-eight-year-old
lawyer named Kiyoshi Kariya had been kidnapped in broad daylight, grabbed by four powerfully built men, and bundled into the back of a van.
Kariya’s sister had been a cult member who had
absconded, and Kariya had received a threatening phone call, demanding to know where she was.
After Kariya’s disappearance, his son found a note that read: “If I disappear, I was
abducted by Aum Shinrikyo.”
A police investigation began, but failed to find either Kariya or his body.

Now Aum Shinrikyo was the chief suspect in the gas attack.
In spite of his protest (“We carry out our religious activities on the basis of Buddhist doctrines, such as no killing”)
police raided Asahara’s headquarters on the slopes of Mount Fuji.
Most of the cultists had left, taking crates of documents; but the police found a huge stockpile of chemicals like sodium
cyanide and peptone for cultivating bacteria.
But the cult insisted, through its spokesmen, that this was all for legitimate peaceful purposes.

On 23 April, the cult’s chief scientist, Hideo Murai, was murdered in front of a crowd of reporters and TV cameramen, stabbed repeatedly in the stomach by a small-time crook named Hiroyuki
Jo, who then demanded, “Isn’t anyone going to arrest me?”
Police quickly obliged.

But where was the guru?
He had vanished without a trace.
On 5 May, two months after the sarin attack, a bag left in the toilet of the Shinjuku train station burst into flame.
Alert staff doused
it with water, but not before it had begun to emit choking fumes.
Police discovered later that, if left undiscovered, it would have given off clouds of hydrogen cyanide gas, called Zyklon B by the
Nazis, which would have been sucked through the ventilators onto the platform.

One of the chief suspects was a young cultist called Yoshihiro Inoue, the guru’s intelligence chief.
He was caught driving a car that contained chemicals for manufacturing high explosives.
This left no one in any doubt that the cult’s protestations about love and peace were false.
On 16 May, there was another huge police raid on the Mount Fuji headquarters; this time they found
a secret room, inside which a large, bearded figure sat cross-legged on the floor in the meditation posture.
He admitted: “I am the guru.
Don’t touch me, I don’t even allow my
disciples to touch me.”

Asahara, whose real name was Chizuo Matsumoto, had been born blind in one eye and partially blind in the other.
He was raised in a poor home, but had been a brilliant pupil at school.
He thought
of becoming a radical politician, like Mao Tse Tung, then began to meditate and claimed that one day he felt the kundalini (the sacred energy that electrifies and enlightens the soul) mounting his
spine.
The 1980s in Japan were rather like the 1960s in Britain and America, a period that Asahara’s biographers have called “the rush hour of the gods”.

Asahara founded a yoga school, which became so profitable that he opened several more.
Then he went off to the Himalayas to meditate and had himself photographed with the Dalai Lama, who told
him he had the mind of a Buddha.
(After Asahara’s arrest, the Dalai Lama was deeply embarrassed by this gaffe.) There in the Himalayas, Asahara claims he experienced enlightenment and
achieved psychic powers.

Back in Tokyo he changed the name of his yoga school to Aum Supreme Truth (Om or Aum is a Sanskrit syllable pronounced during meditation).
Teaching a mixture of Buddhism, Christianity and
Hinduism (with the predictions of Nostradamus thrown in for good measure) Asahara, who claimed to be the embodiment of the god Shiva, was soon surrounded by hundreds of followers.
Since he assured
them that large cash donations would hasten their spiritual enlightenment, he was soon a wealthy man.
Brilliant young students from the universities began to join the sect; one of them, Hideo
Murai, invented a kind of electric cap which, when placed on the head, supposedly raised the user’s level of consciousness.

But desertion roused Asahara to a kind of frenzy.
One disciple who announced he was leaving the sect was told he was in need of physical as well as psychological help, and ordered to drink large
quantities of freezing water.
After a few pints, he went into shock and died.
Another disenchanted disciple, Shuji Taguchi, was strangled; his body burned.
Another was attacked when he had returned
home to his family; his skull was smashed with a hammer.
The cult members also murdered his wife and child.

The sect had a strict celibacy law, but as so often happens with rogue messiahs, the guru couldn’t resist the temptations of the flesh himself.
Asahara regularly enjoyed sex with selected
female disciples, who were then sworn to secrecy.

During the 1990s, Aum Supreme Truth began to spread all over the world.
There had probably not been such a successful cult since Ron Hubbard’s Scientology.
The post-Communist Russians were
particularly sympathetic to it, and Aum Supreme Truth continued to be a powerful movement in Russia – but under the new name of Aleph.

World success made Asahara think in terms of world power.
In 1993, his chief engineer, Kiyohide Hayakawa, was instructed to try and buy an atomic bomb.
(In fact, during 1994, Hayakawa made eight
trips to Russia trying to buy a nuclear warhead.) When he failed, the cult tried to buy a rural area near Tokyo, where there were deposits of uranium.
And when this also failed they decided to buy
land in Australia.
It was half a million acres of scrubland called Banjawarn Station, which the cult bought for $400,000, in cash, after which it paid a further $110,000 for mining rights.
There
they began testing nerve gas on sheep whose skeletons were later found by police.

However, rumours that the cult tested the world’s first non-governmental atomic bomb in the Australian outback are probably false.
A large detonation took place near Banjawarn Station
while the cult were camped there – registered by seismologists hundreds of miles away – but this is now thought to have been caused by the atmospheric explosion of a large meteor or a
small comet.

As the cult’s success increased, so did its paranoia.
This mindset seems to have escalated sharply after the interest the police took in the disappearance of Kiyoshi Kariya, and this
“persecution” in turn seems to have triggered the decision to launch the sarin attacks.
It certainly made no sense.
What possible point could there be to gassing hundreds of people in
the Tokyo subway system?

Asahara’s trial failed to enlighten the public.
Placed on the stand in 1996, he refused to enter a plea of either guilty or not guilty.
For almost nine years, as the trial ground along,
the ex-guru flatly refused to answer questions with anything but incomprehensible mutterings.
In February 2004, he was sentenced to death on multiple counts of murder and attempted murder.
Twelve
of his followers are also on death row for related crimes.
All appealed their death sentences, safe in the knowledge that, given the slowness of the Japanese justice system, they might avoid
execution for many years, even if their appeals were ultimately unsuccessful.

So, why did they do it?
The followers, predictably, say that they were acting on the guru’s orders, and were not privy to his divine plan.
Asahara, through his lawyer, claims the followers
cooked up the whole scheme themselves, without his knowledge.
He says that he doesn’t know why they tried to murder so many people.

Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda

On the morning of 11 September 2001, two hijacked Boeing 757 passenger jets were deliberately crashed into the Twin Towers of the New York World Trade Centre; the first struck
the North Tower at 8.45 a.m., the second hit the South Tower at 9.06 a.m.
Both of the 110-storey (1,350-foot) skyscrapers collapsed within an hour and a half of the first impact.