The Aum Supreme Truth sect, led by guru Shoko Asahara, whose trial ends Friday, was the first terrorist group to make the nightmare of unleashing a weapon of mass destruction on the public a reality.
While Asahara's lack of testimony in his eight-year-long trial for masterminding 27 deaths has left the motives for the 1995 nerve gas attack on the Tokyo subway unclear, his earlier utterances indicated he saw Aum at war with the Japanese state, and it had to strike a decisive blow.
The doomsday cult, whose disciples included brilliant misfit scientists recruited to produce deadly chemical, biological and even nuclear weapons, shocked the world when they released Sarin nerve gas on the Tokyo subway, killing 12 people and injuring 5,000.
In exchange for all their worldly possessions, Aum promised its followers a hand in a new world order after surviving an Armageddon that was supposed to occur in 1997.
"People who have acquired the power of god through the right kind of training will be the ones to create a new world after 1997," Asahara, now 48, once said.
Asahara, an acupuncturist with a conviction for selling quack medicine, whose real name is Chizuo Matsumoto, founded the cult in 1984 and renamed it Aum Shinrikyo (Aum Supreme Truth) in 1987.
Although it incorporated many elements of Buddhism, it also revered Shiva, the Hindu god of destruction.
Its adherents meditated, practised yoga, attempted levitation, wore battery-powered electrode caps to receive their guru's brainwaves, and underwent bizarre training more akin to torture.
But Aum was more than a religion. It was structured as a mini-state with "ministries" mirroring those of the Japanese government.
Asahara was obsessed with the deadly Nazi-invented, Sarin, and was paranoid his enemies would attack him with it.
"As we approach the time of my death, what has become evident is poison-gas warfare, including Sarin," he said in a message to followers in April 1994, according to an Aum magazine published a month later.
"We shall learn how to defend ourselves against toxic gas weapons."
Two months later, it was the cult that unleashed them, releasing Sarin in the central Japanese town of Matsumoto, in an attempt to kill judges hearing a civil property suit brought against the cult. Seven people died.
The guru told followers in a radio message broadcast from Vladivostok a day after the Tokyo attack, "the time has come for you to awaken and give your helping hand to me."
"Facing death, you have to see to it that you will have no regrets."
When police raided Aum's ramshackle headquarters in Kamikuishiki, on the footslopes of Mount Fuji in the week after the Tokyo subway gassing, they found both starving followers and a sophisticated chemical plant capable of producing enough Sarin to kill millions.
Two months later, like another demonised leader run to ground years later, Saddam Hussein, Asahara was captured hiding in a hole in an Aum building in Kamikuishiki.
Aum boasted 10,000 followers at the time of the Tokyo attack, with four overseas branches including Moscow and New York.
But the cult crumbled following the arrests of its leadership in the wake of the Tokyo attack, and avoided being outlawed when the government decided in 1997, the rump membership of around 1,000 grass-roots followers, posed no threat.
In December 1999 Aum apologized for the crimes, changed its name a month later to "Aleph", the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet, signifying a new beginning, and claiming it would reform, disowned Asahara.
A government minister expressed scepticism, saying the sect was simply trying to cirumvent the restrictions of a law passed a month earlier cracking down on its activities.
Today, Aleph has some 1,650 believers in Japan and 300 in Russia, according to the National Police Agency.
Since December 1999, it has paid 464.8 million yen in compensation to some 2,000 victims, about half the 960 million it promised by July 2005, its bankruptcy lawyer said.
Since the subway attacks police have arrested more than 500 people -- with three still on a most wanted list -- and 11 have received the death sentence, although appeals have been filed in those cases.
But the authorities remain vigilant.
On February 16, less than two weeks before the Asahara verdict, 200 officers raided 11 Aleph-related buildings across Japan, and found pictures, books, tapes and videos made by or about Asahara and his teachings in most of them.
The police have noticed a dangerous, hardening trend to restore the founder's teachings, a spokesman said.
"We are seeing the reality of the Asahara revival," the spokesman told AFP. "We cannot rule out the possibility that there will be new illegal acts committed by followers who are absolutely devoted to Asahara."