Tokyo, Japan - Japan has said it would keep a tight watch on a doomsday cult so it could never attack again as it did 10 years ago when it released deadly nerve gas on the Tokyo subway.
Former Aum Supreme Truth sect members offered fresh apologies ahead of the anniversary of the March 20, 1995, attack which killed 12 people and injured 5,500.
"The Public Security Intelligence Agency will maintain strict surveillance to prevent them from causing indiscriminate mass murder again and to clear public worries," Justice Minister Chieko Nono told reporters on Friday.
The cult spread Nazi-invented sarin gas on the Tokyo subway at rush hour, believing the world was on the verge of cataclysmic war and trying to preempt a police raid.
A survey published by the best-selling Yomiuri Shimbun Friday showed 84 percent of the Japanese feared another indiscriminate attack such as the subway gassing in the future.
Security concerns in Tokyo have since turned to Islamic militants, with Al-Qaeda statements threatening Japan over its deployment in Iraq.
But the Yomiuri poll, which covered 1,795 adults nationwide, said 73 percent of Japanese were still worried about the Aum sect.
Aum founder Shoko Asahara, a bearded former acupuncturist whose real name is Chizuo Matsumoto, was sentenced to hang in February 2004 for the sarin attack and a range of other crimes that claimed a total of 27 lives.
He faces an appeal trial but even the date for the first hearing is yet to be set with his defense counsel unable to communicate with him. His daughters have said their father must be ailing under detention and mumbles nonsense.
But Shizue Takahashi, 58, who lost her subway worker husband Kazumasa in the attack, said she and other victims wanted Asahara to die as soon as possible.
"I want his death sentence to be set for sure as soon as possible. I believe many victims are feeling this way," Takahashi, who heads a 160-strong association of survivors and bereaved families, said at a news conference.
Culprits in the attack apologized again, saying they had been under the influence of Asahara.
Kenichi Hirose, a former physics researcher at a prestigious university who was among five Aum members to release the sarin, said his former guru was "a miserable criminal with a mental disorder".
"The accused Matsumoto was God and I took his order to release sarin which was meant for people's salvation by eliminating their evil deeds," Hirose, 40, said in a letter to Jiji Press news agency.
"As time passes, I sense even more the gravity of my crime cannot fade away. I am sorry but cannot find proper words to apologize," he was quoted as saying.
The Tokyo High Court last July upheld the death sentence against Hirose, who has since appealed to the Supreme Court.
He said Asahara had lost his mind after his confidence was shattered when disciples like himself openly accused their former guru, who preached an apocalyptic mix of Buddhist and Hindu beliefs.
"We accused our former God one after another," Hirose said. "Faced with reality, he became unable to maintain his worldview in which he is the absolute deliverer."
Shigeo Sugimoto, 45, who has been appealing a life sentence for an indirect role in the gassing, said that his decade of detention had been spent to "deny Asahara and his teachings and recognize my own stupidity".
"What was worst with me was I thought of life lightly," he said in a separate letter to Jiji Press.
Japan has around 1,650 Aum believers, down sharply from the 11,400 before 1995 but up from around 1,000 in the aftermath of a police crackdown following the attack, according to the Public Security Intelligence Agency.