Makoto Hirata, who belonged to cult that carried out 1995 sarin gas attack, gave himself up – on third attempt
A simple change of heart during the few minutes' walk from one Tokyo police station to another could have kept Makoto Hirata, one of Japan's most wanted men, at large indefinitely.
It has emerged that Hirata, a former member of the Aum Supreme Truth doomsday cult, was sent away by the officer on duty when he first tried to turn himself in, late on New Year's Eve.
The policeman thought it was a prank. But the supposed prankster was a former member of a fanatical group whose members carried out a fatal sarin gas attack on the Tokyo underground in 1995, killing 12 people and making 6,000 others sick. The terrorist attack remains the worst on Japanese soil.
Hirata, wanted in connection with the kidnapping and death earlier that year of a civil servant whose sister was trying to leave the cult, tried again but failed to convince the officer that the face that had been staring down from 150,000 wanted posters for almost 17 years was his.
According to media reports, the 46-year-old suspect was arrested only after he walked, at the officer's urging, to a smaller police station several hundred metres away.
Hirata's hair was longer than in photographs taken in the mid-1990s but his facial features and physique had barely changed during the years in hiding.
"He apparently hasn't had any plastic surgery," a police source told the Yomiuri Shimbun daily.
Only sketchy details have emerged of Hirata's life as a fugitive since his arrest, in the early hours of Sunday. According to the Yomiuri he claimed shame had led him to turn himself in after he witnessed the misery caused by the 11 March earthquake and tsunami.
"The senseless scenes from Tohoku after the earthquake made me question by own situation," he was quoted as telling Taro Takimoto, a lawyer who helped people leave the cult, and who agreed to meet the suspect in custody. "I decided I would turn myself in before the year was up."
How Hirata managed to evade detection for so long remains a mystery. Dressed in jeans and a quilted jacket, he was carrying a rucksack containing underwear, clothes, shampoo and other items. "He was as neat as a pin," one officer was quoted as saying.
He reportedly refused to explain the 100,000 yen (£834) in cash found in his possession, although he is understood to have received 10m yen from the cult shortly after the attacks.
Hirata is suspected of conspiring to kidnap and confine Kiyoshi Kariya, a notary official who died after cult members injected him with an anaesthetic to get him to talk about his sister, who had escaped from the group. Hirata is not thought to have taken part in the gas attacks that destroyed Japan's faith in its public safety on the morning of 20 March 1995.
Aum's former leader, Shoko Asahara, and 12 other senior cult members have been given the death penalty, although these sentences have not been carried out. A further two cult members – Katsuya Takahashi and Naoko Kikuchi – remain at large.
Police also suspect Hirata was involved in the 1995 attempted murder of Takaji Kunimatsu, the then chief of the national police agency. He denies any involvement in the shooting, and reportedly decided to avoid arrest in connection with that crime by turning himself in after the statute of limitations expired in 2010.
Police suspect Hirata's decision was influenced by the death last July of his mother, to whom he was very close.
In the few reported comments he has made to investigators, Hirata appears to be trying to distance himself from the cult, which has renamed itself Aleph and claims to eschew violence but remains under police surveillance. He reportedly told Takimoto, who was injured in a separate sarin attack in 1994, that he no longer believed in the teachings of Asahara, adding that the former guru deserved to be hanged.