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Japan: Aum Shinrikyo Released Harmless Anthrax in 1993 By Mike Nartker Had the 1993 Tokyo attack, which failed, been detected and investigated, the cult might have been prevented from carrying out its later sarin attacks, Keim said during a panel discussion here at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The case began in late June 1993, when residents near a cult-owned building in the Kameido section of Tokyo filed more than 160 complaints over a four-day period of a strong odor coming from the building. When Japanese authorities arrived to investigate, cult members refused allow them into the building, saying the odor was the result of cooking beans. Soon after the complaints, the cult closed the facility and left, Keim said. Photographs of the building, taken while Japanese authorities investigated the complaints, showed a mist being emitted from the roof, Keim said. When authorities entered the building after the cult had departed, they found that the cult had apparently pumped a liquid up to the roof from containers in the basement, Keim said. This method, however, resulted in leakage, which produced slime on the walls of the building, Keim said, and Japanese authorities collected five sample vials. Four of the vials were tested in an effort to determine the makeup of the slime, Keim said, but no tests for anthrax were conducted. The tests did go so far as to look for the presence of human proteins, on the theory that the slime was the result of the cult boiling human bodies, he added. While the tests on the four vials resulted in little information, the fifth vial sat in storage until the Tokyo subway attack in 1995, Keim said. As Japanese authorities interviewed captured Aum members, they described the cult’s earlier efforts to conduct an anthrax attack, which had gone undetected because of a total absence of casualties or reported symptoms. Keim said he was able to receive the forgotten fifth vial of slime recovered from the Kameido facility, from which he was able to grow a culture of anthrax through a series of experiments conducted in 2001. In a foreboding coincidence, Keim said he had submitted a paper on his research on the 1993 incident on Sept. 12, 2001. From his experiment, Keim was able to determine why the attack had resulted in no casualties and why it had been able to go undetected for so long. For some reason, Aum had decided to use the Sterne strain of anthrax; a nonvirulent strain often used to produce animal anthrax vaccines. Keim offered three possible explanations why the cult had used a harmless anthrax strain. First, perhaps the cult was simply incompetent. Keim discounted this theory, however, because the cult membership included a number of scientists and because the veterinary supply company where the cult obtained its original samples would probably have told them it was a nonvirulent strain. A second, more frightening theory is that the 1993 incident was only a dry run for a later attack that would have used virulent pathogens, Keim said. A third explanation, Keim said, is that the cult suffered from poor leadership. The cult’s leader, Shoko Asahara, had been known to order the assassination of his own followers, which instilled in the members of the cult a fear for their lives (see GSN, May 23, 2002). When Asahara ordered in 1993 that a biological weapons attack be carried out, Aum members were probably too afraid to acknowledge that they did not have the necessary materials, so they attempted to obtain whatever they could quickly get their hands on, leading to the failed attack, Keim said. Since the Tokyo subway attack, a number of Aum members have been prosecuted and sentenced for their roles in the development of the nerve agent and its subsequent use (see GSN, Feb. 4). Last year, two Aum scientists were sentenced to death for their roles in the two sarin attacks the cult conducted in Japan in 1994 and 1995 (see GSN, Oct. 11, 2002). Last month, Japanese prosecutors requested the death penalty for another Aum scientist believed to have been involved in the cult’s sarin attacks (see GSN, Jan. 30). Keim said, however, that he had no information as to whether any of the cult members were charged for the 1993 incident. It is doubtful that Japanese authorities have done so because of the seriousness of the other charges involved and the long criminal trials for Aum members involved in the cult’s sarin attacks, he said.
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