Wanted man successfully turns himself in on third try

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 Shinrikyo (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 joker 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 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 in the early hours of Sunday.

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.

Hirata claimed shame had led him to turn himself in after he witnessed the misery caused by the March 11 earthquake and tsunami.

"The senseless scenes from Tohoku after the earthquake made me question my own situation," he was quoted as telling Mr 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."

ORIGINAL SOURCE
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