What was Aum Shinrikyo, and how did it carry out the 1995 Tokyo subway attack?

Aum Shinrikyo was a Japanese new religious movement that grew out of a yoga school founded by Shoko Asahara in Tokyo in 1984. It is known for the 1995 Tokyo subway sarin attack, in which members released the nerve agent sarin in five coordinated attacks on three Tokyo Metro lines during rush hour, killing 14 people, severely injuring 50 and causing temporary vision problems for nearly 1,000 others. It was also found to be responsible for an earlier sarin attack in the city of Matsumoto in 1994, which killed eight.

The group won official status as a religious organization in 1989, and it attracted a considerable number of graduates from Japan's elite universities, which led to it being called a "religion for the elite". Controversy began in the late 1980s, with accusations of deception of recruits, of holding members against their will and of forcing them to donate money. Scholars have offered explanations for how the group justified violence: Daniel Metraux says it used its own unique interpretation of Buddhist ideas, and Robert Jay Lifton believes Asahara interpreted the concept of phowa to claim that killing someone saved them from bad karma.

Thirteen senior members, including Asahara, were sentenced to death and later executed. The group says the attacks were carried out in secret, without the knowledge of other executives and ordinary believers. Afterwards the novelist Haruki Murakami interviewed survivors, and he criticised the Japanese media for focusing on the attackers and ignoring the ordinary people who were harmed.