Tokyo, Japan - The ex-leader of Japanese doomsday cult Aum Shinri Kyo, sentenced to hang for masterminding the fatal gas attack on Tokyo subway trains 10 years ago, is mentally ill and his appeals trial should be suspended, his lawyers said on Friday.
Shoko Asahara, 50, was found guilty of responsibility for the 1995 gassing that killed 12 and sickened thousands, and sentenced to death by a Tokyo court in February last year.
He has appealed the sentence, but his lawyers said Asahara, who has been unable to communicate with them, let alone speak, was unfit to stand trial and should be moved to a hospital for treatment for his mental condition.
"All he can do is grunt 'un'. It's more like a sound, not a voice," said lawyer Takeshi Matsui, adding that Asahara had sometimes suddenly broken into laughter or gone into a spasm in the 120 times the lawyers had visited him at a Tokyo detention center.
Matsui also said Asahara was incontinent, wore diapers and used a wheelchair.
"How can the court judge that he is normal? I am enraged," he told a news conference.
Psychiatrists hired by the lawyers have said Asahara, whose real name is Chizuo Matsumoto, may be suffering from a brain disorder, and one psychiatrist has judged that the former guru is incompetent, Matsui said.
The Tokyo High Court rejected the defence's previous request to suspend the case, but it has appointed a psychiatrist and the doctor is currently conducting an evaluation on Asahara.
"VOICE OF SOCIETY"
The defense team criticized the court for refusing to recognize Asahara's illness and rushing to move on with the trial, saying the court was keen to finalize the death sentence.
"They think that they have to listen to the voice of society. They think that society wants this evil man to be executed right away," said Akio Matsushita, another member of the defense.
The gassing, with its images of bodies lying across platforms and soldiers in gas masks sealing off Tokyo subway stations, stunned the Japanese public and shattered the country's myth of public safety.
About 5,500 people were injured, some permanently, when members of the cult released sarin, first developed by the Nazis, in Tokyo rush-hour trains on March 20, 1995.
Asahara was also found guilty of other charges including a series of other crimes that killed 15 people. He had pleaded not guilty but never testified and made mostly incoherent remarks in the court during the trial.
Asahara set up the cult in 1987, mixing Buddhist and Hindu meditation with apocalyptic teachings and attracting, at its peak, at least 10,000 members in Japan and overseas, among them graduates of some of the nation's elite universities.
The pudgy, nearly blind guru predicted that the United States would attack Japan and turn it into a nuclear wasteland.
Aum Shinri Kyo (Supreme Truth Sect), which admitted involvement in the gassing, later changed its name to Aleph, the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet.
Its leaders insist that the cult is now benign, but Japanese authorities still keep its membership of about 1,600 under surveillance.