A Japanese court has upheld the death sentence for a high-ranking former Aum Supreme Truth cult member over the murder of an anti-sect lawyer and his family.
The Tokyo High Court rejected an appeal by Kiyohide Hayakawa, 54, who was one of the founding members of the doomsday cult and built a plant to produce the Nazi-invented Sarin nerve gas at the foot of Mount Fuji.
The Aum cult earned worldwide notoriety in March 1995 by spreading Sarin on the Tokyo subway, killing 12 people and injuring thousands.
Hayakawa was convicted of strangling Tsutsumi Sakamoto, 33, his 29-year-old wife and baby son in 1989, constructing the Sarin plant and the murder of a cult follower, among other crimes.
The bodies of Sakamoto, an anti-cult campaigner who gave advice to cult deserters, his wife Satoko and one-year-old son were only discovered in September 1995, buried in shallow graves.
Dressed in a grey business suit and open-necked shirt, Hayakwa stood rigidly at the witness stand Friday as presiding judge Taketaka Nakagawa rejected his appeal and said "it was fair that the initial ruling judged he had played a crucial role" in the assault.
He bowed slightly and returned to his seat in the dock, silently jotting down something on a notebook and smiling to the public gallery as if he recognised a friend, according to Jiji Press news agency.
Tomoyuki Oyama, the 73-year-old father of Satoko, the murdered wife, urged Hayakawa not to lodge a further appeal, while a defence lawyer told reporters his client would take the case to the Supreme Court.
"Our belief that he should face capital punishment is unchanged although it will not heal our sorrow," Oyama said in a statement.
Hayakawa was sentenced to hang in July 2000. Hayakawa was convicted of personally throttling Sakamoto's wife as the couple begged the Aum followers not to harm their baby boy.
His defence counsel had argued his mind had been under the control of Aum guru Shoko Asahara, who was himself sentenced to death in February after a marathon trial.