overseas media on Falun Gong

TOKYO: A Japanese court sentenced a seventh former member of the Aum Shinrikyo doomsday cult to death yesterday for murders linked to the group's killing of a man who wanted to leave the group and a lawyer investigating the cult.

Kiyohide Hayakawa, 51, was charged with the murder of a lawyer opposed to the cult along with his wife and year-old baby in 1989 and also for strangling a member who tried to quit.

Tokyo District Court Judge Kaoru Kanayama said Hayakawa deserved the penalty because he played the main role in the extremely brutal killing of the family of lawyer Tsutsumi Sakamoto.

"It is unforgivable that he showed no hesitation to kill in the interests of the religious group," Kyodo news agency quoted Kanayama as saying. "There is no room at all for mercy. We cannot see even a fragment of humanity in him."

Hayakawa, known as the cult's "construction minister" also was charged with building a factory to produce the sarin gas unleashed in an attack on the Tokyo subway in 1995 that killed 12 people and injured thousands.

Hayakawa is the seventh Aum member to receive the death penalty for his involvement in the subway gas attack and the third ordered to hang for the murder of the Sakamoto family.

Executions in Japan are by hanging, but take place only rarely. Most of those condemned spend many years in prison.