Is Aum 'guru' Asahara's execution imminent?

"Can this be it?" they wondered with a growing sense of tension and excitement.

"The mail didn't go into details, but from the wording we knew it would be an announcement of an execution," a reporter who covers the ministry for a national daily told Shukan Shincho (Jan 4-11). "We only had 90 minutes from the notification to hustle and find out who'd been executed, but we sensed it just might be a 'big shot' -- Shoko Asahara."

After a lengthy trial, the 62-year-old Asahara (whose real name is Chizuo Matsumoto), founder and head of the Aum Supreme Truth religious cult, was found guilty of 13 out of 17 capital charges, including instigating toxic nerve gas attacks in Matsumoto, Nagano Prefecture in June 1994 and on the Tokyo subway system in March 1995. He was sentenced to death in February 2004 and lost his final appeal in September 2006, After one of the last two fugitives from the cult, Katsuya Takahashi, was finally arrested and prosecuted, attorney Taro Takimoto told the magazine: "Once the Supreme Court had ruled on Takahashi's final appeal, I was expecting Asahara's execution to proceed."

Indeed, such a view was common in the nation's legal circles. However the aforementioned reporter gave the opinion that, "Under Prime Minister Abe's administration, practically anything can happen. In July of this year, two people were executed; one's case was still under appeal from six months earlier. Also in December, two more death row convicts were hanged. One had been 19, a minor at the time of his crime. It's been two decades since a similar execution, of Norio Nagayama, who was also a minor when he committed murders, has been carried out."

The magazine also noticed that as the end of this year approached, scuttlebutt about the "decision to proceed with Asahara's execution" has been making the rounds in government and political circles.