TOKYO — A former member of Japan's Aum Shinrikyo doomsday cult was sentenced to die on Tuesday — the sixth member sentenced to hang for murders committed before and during the cult's fatal gas attack on the Tokyo subway in 1995.
Satoru Hashimoto, 33, was found guilty of the 1989 murder of an anti-Aum lawyer and his wife and infant son as well as for a 1994 sarin gas attack on a central Japan city that killed seven and injured many others, court officials said.
Lawyer Tsutsumi Sakamoto, one of Aum's most vocal critics, had been investigating its activities.
Prosecutors said Hashimoto and other cult members crept into the home of Sakamoto as he and his wife and son slept, injected them with lethal doses of potassium chloride and strangled them.
The murders drew public attention to the cult even before the lethal subway gas attack in March 1995, which left 12 dead and thousands ill and shocked a nation that had long prided itself on the safety of its citizens.
Tokyo District Court Judge Toshio Nagai said Hashimoto, a karate expert and bodyguard to cult founder Shoko Asahara, deserved the maximum penalty as his crimes were unprecedentedly brutal, media reports said.
Kazuaki Okazaki, another former senior Aum member, was also sentenced to death in 1998 for the murder of the Sakamoto family — the first death sentence handed down to Aum members.
Executions in Japan are by hanging but take place only rarely. Most of those condemned spend many years in prison.
Hashimoto was also charged with building a plant to produce sarin gas used in the attacks.
Prosecutors had said Hashimoto blindly obeyed Asahara and took an active part in the crimes because he wanted to be promoted within the cult, Kyodo news agency said.
Last week, two other Aum members were sentenced to death for murder and attempted murder for their roles in releasing sarin nerve gas in the Tokyo subway incident.
Kyodo news agency reported on Tuesday that the two, Toru Toyoda, 32, and Kenichi Hirose, 36, are appealing against their sentences.
Another key member of the cult, Yasuo Hayashi, 42, dubbed a "murder machine" by the media for his crimes, was sentenced to death in June because, the judge said, he released the largest amount of sarin gas in the subway attack.
Cult leader Asahara, whose real name is Chizuo Matsumoto, remains on trial for organising the gassing and 16 other charges.
Asahara's trial is now in its fifth year and could go on much longer given Japan's notoriously snail-paced court system, with some legal experts saying it may well take more than 15 years for a final verdict.
Of the five cult members charged with the Tokyo subway attack, four have received the death penalty and one life imprisonment.
Most of Aum's leaders are behind bars, but worries about the cult's activities prompted the government to place it under surveillance in February for three years.
The cult has changed its name to Aleph—the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet—and insists it is now a benign religious group. In the past, it preached that the world was coming to an end and that the cult must arm itself to prepare for calamities.