South Korean Kills Japanese Cult Official Assailant Stabs No. 2 Leader Of Group Suspected In Deadly Nerve Gas Attack

A man armed with a kitchen knife Sunday fatally stabbed a top official of Aum Supreme Truth, the cult suspected of the recent deadly nerve gas attack on Tokyo’s subways, in the latest outbreak of violence shaking this normally placid nation.

In full view of reporters and police surrounding the cult’s Tokyo headquarters, the man lunged forward and stabbed Hideo Murai, 36, the group’s No. 2 official and head of its chemical operations. Murai underwent surgery for deep stab wounds through his stomach nearly to his back, requiring massive blood transfusions, but died about 2:30 a.m. today.

Murai was believed to have held the key to cracking the police investigation into whether the group had manufactured and released the nerve gas in an attack that killed 12 and sickened more than 5,500 commuters last month.

Police immediately arrested Hiroyuki Jo, 29, a South Korean national. Jo reportedly told police he had joined a rightist group last year and “wanted to hurt an Aum leader.”

He had bought the 8-inch-long carving knife the day before the attack and then waited for an Aum leader to show up Sunday, police told the Japanese media. After the attack, Jo dropped his knife and waited for police to arrest him.

Murai, dressed in the cult’s collarless pale green garb, kept walking even after he had been stabbed and didn’t utter a sound, witnesses said.

In a news conference today, Aum spokesmen decried the attack and questioned whether it was an individual act or one planned by a group.

“Why didn’t the police protect him?” demanded Yoshinobu Aoyama, the cult’s lawyer. “They could have predicted this kind of thing.” Aum spokesman Fumihiro Joyu hinted that the attacker may have been involved in a conspiracy rather than an individual act of vigilantism.

The attack is the latest in a bizarre string of violence that has set Japan on edge and caused it to question its fabled public safety. Since last year, at least five attacks of poison or foulsmelling gas have been made against the public, including the Tokyo incident, two subsequent cases in the nearby port city of Yokohama and an attack in a residential neighborhood in the city of Matsumoto last summer.

In addition, the head of Japan’s National Police Agency was shot and wounded in the most serious attack against a public official since World War II.