Tokyo court upholds nine-year sentence for senior cult member

A nine-year prison sentence for Makoto Hirata, a former senior member of the AUM Shinrikyo cult, was upheld by the Tokyo High Court Wednesday, for his involvement in incidents of abduction, bombing and firebombing, prior to the fatal 1995 sarin attack on the Tokyo subway system.

Hirata's defense team had appealed a lower court's ruling in March last year that had found him guilty of abducting and confining a city clerk, bombing an apartment and firebombing one of the cult's facilities, all in 1995 before the cult's devastating attack on the capital's subway system that killed 13 people.

Wednesday's verdict to uphold the nine-year sentence, despite Hirata's lawyers claiming the sentence was harsh based on a previous sentence handed down to a cult member for similar crimes, was delivered by a panel of three professional and six citizen judges.

They ruled, against Hirata's defense, that the defendant had had knowledge of the cult's plans he undertook before he took part in them.

Previous verdicts at the Tokyo District Court concerning AUM have been reached by only professional judges.

Hirata had long been a fugitive on the lam, but turned himself in after 17-years of evading capture, reportedly in a bid to extend the execution dates of AUM members on death role, as his trial was being conducted.

The AUM Shinrikyo cult launched sarin gas attacks on the Tokyo subway system on March 20, 1995, which left 13 people dead and thousands of others ill.

The group was also held responsible for an earlier sarin attack on June 27, 1994, in a parking lot near housing for judges in Matsumoto, Nagano Prefecture, killing eight people.

AUM Shinrikyo renamed itself Aleph in January 2000 and in 2007 a senior AUM disciple and his followers left Aleph to launch a splinter group called Hikari no Wa (Circle of Rainbow Light). Endi