![]() The deaths of Di Mambro and Jouret didn’t bring an end to the violence: In December 1995, 16 more members took their own lives or were killed in France, while an additional five committed suicide in March 1997 in Quebec.ĭi Mambro, a shadowy figure born in France in 1924, founded the Order of the Solar Temple and made the charismatic Jouret, a homeopathic doctor born in 1947 in the Belgian Congo (present-day Democratic Republic of the Congo), the organization’s public face. In October 1994, Di Mambro and Jouret, along with 51 of their followers in the Order of the Solar Temple, an apocalyptic cult founded in Europe in 1984, committed suicide or were murdered in Switzerland and Quebec, Canada. Luc Jouret, one of the founders of the Order of the Solar Temple, pictured 1994. ![]() Jim Jones: Ordered hundreds of his followers to kill themselves as a “revolutionary act” Aum Shinrikyo, renamed Aleph in 2000, still exists, although its membership is smaller than it was in the mid-1990s. He was convicted and sentenced to death in 2004 and was executed on July 6, 2018. Within several months after the attacks, Asahara was found hiding out at his group’s compound near Mount Fuji and arrested. When the 1995 subway attack took place, the group was estimated to have some 10,000 members in Japan and more than 30,000 around the world, many of them in Russia. By the early 1990s, Aum Shinrikyo, which attracted members from some of Japan’s top universities, was stockpiling chemical weapons. In 1990, he and some of his followers ran for parliament but lost. Eventually, Asahara began claiming he could read minds and levitate. He established Aum Shinrikyo as a religious organization that promoted Buddhist and Hindu concepts, along with elements of the Bible and prophecies of Nostradamus. ![]() Aum Shinrikyo targeted the Kasumigaseki station, in the area where many of Japan’s government offices are located, as part of what they thought would be an apocalyptic battle with the government.īorn into a poor family in Japan in 1955, Asahara (real name Chizuo Matsumoto) lost part of his vision at a young age due to illness. On March 20, 1995, members of Aum Shinrikyo (“Supreme Truth”), founded by Asahara in the 1980s, released the poisonous nerve gas sarin on five crowded subway trains during morning rush hour in Tokyo, killing 13 people and sickening thousands more. Shoko Asahara, leader of the Aum Shinrikyo, pictured in 1990. ![]()
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