Police have detected DNA of a former member of the AUM Shinrikyo cult from a coin found at the site of the 1995 shooting of the then National Police Agency chief, police officials said Monday.
The former cult member submitted voluntarily to Metropolitan Police Department interrogation Saturday and Sunday. He denied any involvement in the shooting and no breakthroughs are expected in the investigation into the unprecedented incident, they said.
The coin was a South Korean 10-won coin. The MPD conducted DNA testing and found DNA from sweat and grime collected from the coin matched with that of the man's nails.
"I didn't go to the crime site," the man, 33, was quoted by police as saying. "I never knew of such a coin."
The former cult member lives in Yokohama and used to belong to AUM's "construction ministry," the police officials said. He was also one of the planners of an AUM-organized tour to Russia to experience shooting of guns.
The police arrested four other men, including a former police officer and a former senior AUM member, in July for alleged involvement in the shooting. But later in the month prosecutors had to release them due to a lack of credible evidence.
The Tokyo District Public Prosecutors Office has continued investigations related to the four since their release but is believed unlikely to indict them.
The former cult member in question initially refused to cooperate with the DNA analysis. The police then obtained warrants from a court to force him to provide nail samples.
Former NPA Commissioner General Takaji Kunimatsu was shot and severely wounded in front of his home in Tokyo's Arakawa Ward on March 30, 1995, eight days after the police launched raids on AUM following the fatal sarin gas attacks on the Tokyo subway system.