August 9
JAPAN:
The Aum Shinrikyo Executions and a Society in Denial----On July 6, former Aum
Shinrikyo cult leader Asahara Shoko (Matsumoto Chizuo) was put to death, along
with 6 of his senior followers. Executions of the remaining 6 death row
prisoners in the case followed on July 26. Asahara never spoke during his
trial, and now that he is dead the possibility of ever learning what motivated
the cult's attack on the Tokyo subway has gone with him.
On the morning of July 6, Aum Shinrikyo cult leader Asahara Shoko (originally
named Matsumoto Chizuo), who was sentenced to death for his part in a series of
deadly crimes including the sarin attacks on the Tokyo subway in 1995, finally
went to the gallows. 6 other senior figures in the cult were executed the same
day.
The Ministry of Justice does not normally go out of its way to disclose details
of executions, but on this day the ministry released the names of the executed
prisoners to the press almost in real time. It was an exceptional case.
Why did the ministry depart from its usual modus operandi and allow the
executions to become a public drama in this way? One popular explanation is
that the ministry was acting on instructions from the prime minister's office.
Whether this theory is true or not, I can't say. But if the theory is correct,
as many people in the media insist, then the implications are clear. The prime
minister or those around him must have decided that giving the go-ahead for a
mass execution of those responsible for the Aum attack would help to bolster
the prime minister's wilting public support. I wouldn't be surprised if this is
the real reason why the government cooperated with the media to ensure maximum
coverage.
No group in postwar Japanese history has been so reviled as the Aum Shinrikyo
cult. The group represents Japan's first true "public enemy." As the cult's
leader and guru, Asahara was so despised that even people normally in favor of
abolishing the death penalty made an exception in his case. Asahara was widely
seen as a "singularity"- an embodiment of evil so bereft of any normal sense of
humanity that putting him to death was the only sensible solution.
And then, on July 26, just as I was finishing an earlier version of this
article about the executions, another 6 members of the cult went to their
deaths.
Interviews with the Condemned
Of the 12 cult members who were recently executed, I conducted interviews with
6 during the course of their incarceration: Niimi Tomomitsu, Hayakawa Kiyohide,
and Nakagawa Tomomasa (who were executed along with Asahara on July 6), as well
as Hayashi Yasuo, Okazaki Kazuaki, and Hirose Ken'ichi, whose death sentences
were carried out on July 26.
The media often depicted Niimi as the most vicious of the cultists, but
whenever I met him he always bowed politely and never spoke badly of anyone.
Every now and then, the corners of his mouth would curl into an attractive
smile. Hayakawa, the oldest of the former Aum believers on death row, had a
real sweet tooth. I would always bring him sweets and candies when I went to
interview him, and he used to jokingly blame me for making him fat: "Thanks to
you, Mori, I've really put on weight," he once wrote in a letter to me.
As Asahara's personal doctor, Nakagawa probably spent more time at the guru's
side than anyone else. He was a painstaking, precise man - as well as being the
personification of gentleness and kindness. I took my wife with me to visit him
once, because I genuinely thought he was someone she should meet. Nakagawa
beamed with happiness when I introduced my wife and kept bowing politely from
the other side of the thick acrylic panels that separated us.
The media used to call Hayashi a "killing machine." Perhaps because we were
roughly the same age, we soon fell into talking to each other casually, without
the distance of formal language. I once visited him in prison with his mother.
She and I sat together during the visit, and when his mother started to tear
up, Hayashi tried desperately to console her. Okazaki was very much an
ordinary, down-to-earth character. He used to send me stacks of sumie ink wash
paintings he had done in prison. Hirose spent his time in detention making
mathematics reference books for schoolchildren. He was a serious, sober type of
person with little time for joking around. He told me that during the attack on
the subway, he kept constantly reminding himself that what he and his fellow
believers were doing was for the sake of the salvation of the world.
But now, none of these people are alive. They have vanished from the world.
They all told me separately they thought they deserved to die for the crime
they had committed. Sometimes they fought back tears when they spoke of what
they had done. Talking to them made it harder for me to know what to feel about
the crime and those who had been responsible for it.
Individually, they were all kind individuals: gentle, peaceful, and
good-natured. But it was beyond any doubt that they had deliberately caused the
deaths of many innocent people, and injured and traumatized many more. Often as
I sat talking to them in the prison visiting room, I would become confused and
uncertain of my emotions. I no longer knew what to think about crime and
punishment. Was it really necessary for them to be dispatched from the world?
Of course, all of us must die someday, whether in an accident, from illness, or
simply because of old age. But these men did not die for any of these reasons.
They were legally killed by the state.
A Lost Chance to Understand Aum's True Motives
Right up until the death sentences of the 6 men were carried out, I visited
them in prison numerous times and continued to correspond with them by letter.
The perspective they gave me (the voice of the perpetrators) provided a
valuable "auxiliary line" that can help us in our attempts to understand the
Aum cult and its crimes.
Listening to the court proceedings during his first trial, my immediate feeling
was that Asahara had suffered a mental collapse. His behavior as he sat in the
defendant's seat was clearly abnormal. At the time, I wondered if he was
perhaps faking an illness. But now, having met many people involved in the case
and having heard their accounts, and having carried out numerous interviews
myself, I am convinced that he had indeed undergone a kind of mental breakdown
and was unsound during his trial.
But no one mentioned this. If anyone had said anything, the trial would have
come to an end and the chance to hang the singularity that was Asahara, the
very embodiment of evil, would have been lost. Anyone who'd dared to speak up
would have been abused and reviled by the whole of Japan.
And so the trial went on, with Asahara slumped in his defendant's seat, often
in dirty adult diapers, which he had worn since reportedly becoming incontinent
in 2001. There was little doubt by this stage about why the guru's followers
had carried out their crime: they had been acting on instructions from Asahara.
The radical doctrines of religion, which inverted the ordinary significance of
death and life, also played a part. Believing firmly in the reincarnation of
the soul, and telling themselves that what they were doing was for the sake of
the salvation of the world, they went out and deliberately took the lives of
innocent people. But why had Asahara ordered them to act in this way?
None of the people who carried out the attack heard the orders to release sarin
from Asahara directly. Murai Hideo, one of the cult's senior leaders,
apparently conveyed Asahara's instructions to devotees, but he was stabbed to
death around a month after the attack. Inoue Yoshihiro testified that he had
conspired with Asahara to release the nerve agent to ward off an impending
criminal investigation into the cult, but he later retracted his testimony. Why
did the cult members release sarin into the Tokyo subway that day? The only
person who could tell the truth about the real motive was Asahara himself.
But in a state of mental collapse Asahara said nothing. He was in no state to
spill the truth about his motives even if he'd wanted to. As a consequence, the
motives behind the attack are still not known. The motive is the most important
piece of evidence for understanding any crime. Without a true understanding of
what happened, our anxiety and concern for the future will only increase.
(source: Mori Tatsuya, nippon.com)
UNITED KINGDOM:
Bodies in Birmingham exhibition could be executed Chinese prisoners, says
doctor----Real Bodies show at NEC leads to call for an investigation into
exhibits' identities
The bodies of 20 Chinese people featured in a UK museum exhibition could be
those of prisoners once detained in labour camps, and victims of the death
penalty in China, according to a leading doctor.
The Real Bodies exhibition, currently at the Birmingham NEC, publicly displays
the skinless preserved bodies. But there are now calls for an investigation
into their identities and cause of death to be held while they are in the UK.
The bodies were provided to the event organisers, Imagine Exhibitions, through
the Dalian Medical University in China.
Campaigner Dr David Nicholl, a consultant neurologist at City Hospital
Birmingham, said that the university's facilities in the city of Dalian were
within driving distance of labour and prison camps. Coupled with the large
number of bodies of the same age and gender, and the lack of any identity
information, Nicholl suspects the bodies could be those of executed inmates.
"I have huge questions about why all these unclaimed bodies come from Dalian in
sizeable numbers and how many bodies Imagine Exhibitions have actually got," he
said. "My own registrar went to this exhibition. I asked him to note down the
gender and age of the bodies. They are all young men - none of them are
elderly, which I have to say is pretty suspicious given that there are a number
of labour camps within a matter of hours' drive of Dalian.
"If you look at these exhibitions they are never gender balanced - it's always
largely men. Most people who die, die when they're older, so to have an
exhibition like this is really suspicious."
Nicholl says event organisers were never given consent by individuals or their
families for the bodies to be used. "I think the public are being conned," he
said. "Why are we having exhibitions like this in this country if they can't
prove consent?" Israel banned the exhibition in 2012 in a decision taken by
judges in the Israeli Supreme Court, said Nicholl.
US investigative reporter and author Ethan Gutmann also alleges that the bodies
in the exhibition could be political prisoners who practiced Falun Gong, a
religion banned in China in the late 90s. This move is thought to have resulted
in thousands of people being imprisoned and executed in labour camps.
Gutmann believes that one of the places bodies of persecuted people may have
been taken to was Dalian Medical University, as it is in the same province as
Masanjia labour camp, one of the largest camps in China "specialising in Falun
Gong".
"It's a crime against humanity," he said. "Several hundred thousand people were
executed purely for being Falun Gong and you have a company which is
potentially sending evidence all over the world."
Nicholl and Guttman are among the doctors, human rights activists, MPs and
Lords who have signed a letter to Theresa May stating that the exhibition
should be shut down.
Guttman says he hopes the specimens will be DNA tested. "The DNA can be
extracted and used to prove relations," he said. "If we make some matches, we
can identify family lines and you could ask them, do you have a missing person?
"People in England have a right to know what they are seeing and people in
China have a right to know what happened to their loved ones." The Dalian
Medical University released a statement in response saying: "All of these
specimens are unclaimed bodies and are legally authorised to be received by the
city morgue.
"The specimens that are being presented in Real Bodies: The Exhibition were
originally received from the city morgue and then transferred to medical
universities in China and ultimately were legally donated to Dalian Hoffen
Bio-Technique Laboratory for preservation, dissection and exhibition."
The statement rejected allegations that the specimens died of unnatural causes,
detailing that following inspection "there is absolutely no evidence" that they
"received trauma or physical abuse associated with torture, execution or other
violent injury".
The president of Imagine Exhibitions, Tom Zaller, called the suspicions about
the bodies "fake news".
"I refuse to entertain these ridiculous accusations without a shred of evidence
to back these baseless claims," he said.
The exhibition includes more than 200 human organs, foetuses and body parts,
also sourced from China, and has already been viewed by millions around the
world.
(source: The Guardian)
YEMEN----executions
3 men have been publicly shot and hanged after they were found guilty of raping
and killing a 10-year-old boy.
The paedophiles were executed yesterday in the country's capital Sana'a where
their bodies were put on display to discourage others from carrying out similar
attacks.
Before their deaths Abdul Jalil al-Ashhab, 19, Mohammed Said al-'Uqri, 27, and
Ghaleb al-Rashdi, also 19, were handcuffed and paraded in front of the crowds
before being ordered to lie down.
They were then executed with 3 shots aiming for the heart, before being winched
into the air as a warning to other potential offenders.
According to media in the Middle East, the 3 men kidnapped the young boy as he
headed to his grandmother's house in the village of Na'wa on October 29.
The trio covered the child's mouth with a cloth and took him to a nearby
school, where they carried out their horrific crimes.
After torturing and raping the boy, they choked him to death and hid his body
in an abandoned house.
The men were executed by a firing squad on August 8.
Yemen, south of Saudi Arabia, still strongly enforces capital punishment for
violent cases such as murder, rape, and terrorism.
The country has one of the world's highest rates of execution per capita.
In theory, the death penalty can also be used in cases of Islamic of 'Hudud'
offences under Sharia law such as adultery, sexual misconduct, sodomy,
prostitution, blasphemy and apostasy.
Around 50 countries in the world still carry the death penalty, including
China, Japan, Pakistan and Thailand.
While the United States is the only country in the G7 to practice it.
A whopping 31 states still carry capital punishment, although only 10 of them
have executed anyone in the last 5 years.
(source: metro.co.uk)
IRAN----executions
Prisoner Hanged in Bandar Abbas
A prisoner was hanged at Bandar Abbas Central Prison on murder charges.
According to a close source, on the morning of Tuesday, August 7, a prisoner
was hanged at Bandar Abbas Central Prison. The prisoner, sentenced to death on
murder charges, was arrested in July 2014.
The prisoner was identified as Amir Ali Kalivand, 46, from Lorestan. He was
transferred to Bandar Abbas Prison from Hajiabad (a city in Hormozgan province)
Prison.
A close source told IHR about his case, "Amir Ali Kalivand was also charged
with five kilograms of methamphetamine but he was executed on the charge of
murdering a minibus driver."
The execution of this prisoner has not been announced by the state-run media so
far.
According to confirmed reports by Iran Human Rights (IHR), at least 36 people
were executed in different Iranian cities in the month of July, 24 of whom were
sentenced to death on murder charges.
*********************
4 executed on murder, rape charges
3 prisoners were executed at Minab Prison (Hormozgan province) on the charge of
rape.
According to a report by Azad News Agency (ANA), on the morning of Wednesday,
August 8, 3 prisoners were executed at Minab Prison.
The prisoners, whose identities have not been mentioned in the report, were
sentenced to death on the charge of rape in 2016.
(source for both: Iran Human Rights)
TURKEY:
Turkey would execute Ocalan if death penalty reinstated - far-right leader
Abdullah Ocalan, the jailed leader of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) armed
militant group, will be executed if Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan
signs off on a law to restore the death penalty, independent news site T24
quoted the leader of the far-right Grand Unity Party (BBP) as saying.
Erdogan last week said he would agree to restore the death penalty, which
Turkey abolished in 2004, if parliament passed such a law. The move would end
Turkey's decades-long bid to join the European Union.
Tens of thousands of people, mainly Kurds, have been killed in fighting between
security forces and the PKK since Ocalan's group took up arms in 1984.
"Does Ocalan's connection to a terrorist organisation still continue? It does.
Is he still the leader of a terrorist organisation? He is. Does he still give
orders? He does. As such, if he is tried as the instructor of these acts and
receives the death penalty, then he will be executed," BBP leader Mustafa
Destici said.
The BBP has just 1 seat in the 600-seat parliament, but its views chime with
many among the ruling party and its far-right coalition allies.
Destici previously suggested a proposal to reinstate the death penalty for
offences such as murder, treason and sexual offences against children would be
introduced to Turkey's parliament in October. He also suggested a referendum
could be held in which the electorate could decide on the issue.
(source: ahvalnews.com)
SRI LANKA:
2 murder-convicted Army officers given death penalty
2 former Army officers have been sentenced to death by the Trincomalee High
Court for assaulting and murdering an individual from Gurunagar area in Jaffna
after taking him in for interrogations, says Ada Derana reporter.
Following a lengthy trial, the verdict was delivered by the High Court Judge
Manikkavasagar Illancheliyan.
Accordingly, former Army Major Dickson Rajamanthree and an employee of the camp
named Priyantha Rajakaruna have been sentenced to death.
On the September 10 1998, the convicts had assaulted and murdered an individual
named Gnanasingham Anton Gunasekaram for by taking him in for questioning,
claiming him to be a terrorist.
Reportedly, the judicial autopsy reports revealed that the deceased had
suffered 21 cut wounds to the body.
The case was first taken up before the Trincomalee High Court on May 05 2009.
(source: adaderana.lk)
INDIA:
Bhopal: 31 death row convicts move upper courts
Challenging the judgement, 31 criminals awarded capital punishment in heinous
crimes have moved higher courts. Out of the total cases 16 are related to rape
and murder, while 15 criminals have been convicted for homicide, till June
2018.
Lower courts have sentenced death penalty to 7 persons charging them with
minors' rape and murder; of these appeals of 5 convicts are pending with the
Supreme Court, and 2 with the High Court. DG Jail, Sanjay Choudhary, said that
highest numbers criminals on death row are serving imprisonment in Indore. A
total of 13 criminals have been awarded capital punishment of which 6 have been
convicted for rape and murder.
In Jabalpur Central Jail, 12 criminals have been given death sentence, of these
8 have been convicted for rape and murder, informed Choudhary while talking to
Free Press. In Gwalior there are 3 convicts, 2 sentenced gallows for rape and
murder, in Bhopal 2 and in Ujjain 1 is facing the doom for murder, he added.
ADG prosecution Dr Rajendra Kumar said that officers were making strong cases
against the criminals to ensure justice to the victims. Indore court in April
2013 had awarded capital punishment to 3 criminals Jitendra Singh, Devendra and
Ketan for kidnapping, rape and murder. Their petition was cancelled by the
Supreme Court and even the mercy petition to the President of India was
rejected but now they have filed a review petition in the Supreme Court which
is now pending.
(source: Free Press Journal)
***************************************
Madhya Pradesh HC upholds death penalty to child rapist, says its not a soft
state
Madhya Pradesh high court on Wednesday upheld death penalty awarded to a youth
by a lower court in Shahdol district for rape and murder and murderer of a
4-year-old girl citing that extreme punishment would convey a message to these
predators that it is not a soft state where the criminals committing such
serious crimes may get reprieve in the guise of humanity.
"Humanity is more in danger in the hands of such persons. We find that there is
no mitigating circumstance in favour of the appellant," division bench
comprising chief justice Hemant Gupta and Justice Vijay Kumar Shukla has ruled.
Vinod alias Rahul Chouhtha, 22, was handed over death penalty by district and
Sessions judge R K Singh on February 28 this year. He had lured the young
neighbourhood girl for biscuits and raped her on May 13, 2017. Her body was
found behind the bushes. He had moved high court against this order.
After going through his application MPHC ruled that he had breached the trust
of a girl child tempting her by offering biscuit to accompany him to meet her
father.
"It is an act of extreme depravity when the appellant prompted a young child
whose only fault was that she believed the appellant to be her well-wisher. The
crime against the girl child are on rise, therefore, extreme punishment may
deter the other criminals indulging in such crime," reads MPHC order.
This Court has the social responsibility to make the citizen of this country
know that law cannot come to the rescue of such person based on humanity, they
said adding "we find that the capital punishment awarded to the appellant is
one of the rarest of rare cases where the extreme capital punishment is
warranted".
Supreme Court had on Tuesday expressed serious concern over the growing
incidents of rape in India and said that women are being raped "left, right,
and centre". A 3-judge bench of Justices Madan B Lokur Deepak Gupta and K.M.
Joseph hearing the suo motu petition relating to rape incidents in Muzaffarpur
shelter home in Bihar quoted the NCRB data as per which, 38,947 women were
raped in India, the highest being in Madhya Pradesh.
(source: timesofindia.com)
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