overseas media on Falun Gong

TOKYO: Japan's police yesterday removed children from the bizarre Life Space cult, whose disciples kept a corpse at an airport hotel and insisted it was alive, officials and reports said.

Nine children aged seven to 16 were taken into protection from two cult facilities in Tokyo during multiple police raids, said a report by Jiji Press news agency.

Tolerance for such groups in Japan has dwindled since Aum Supreme Truth doomsday cult's murderous 1995 poison gas attack on Tokyo's subway, which resulted in 12 deaths.

Plain-clothed investigators were shown on television marching into Life Space buildings in Tokyo and the cult-operated Arts Village restaurant in central Japan's Nagoya.

Carrying cardboard boxes to ferry confiscated materials, they also raided hotel rooms in the eastern Japanese town of Oarai, home of Life Space guru Koji Takahashi, a former tax accountant.

In a television interview, Takahashi, 61, was asked about allegations he had separated children from their parents in the cult and taken them abroad to countries including Spain and the United States.

'They are studying abroad and you cannot do that without moving," he said in an interview recorded the previous day.

But he conceded that "there are many children not attending school," who lived in the cult's facilities in Japan.

On November 12, police found the mummified corpse of 66-year-old Shinichi Kobayashi in a hotel room that had been occupied for more than four months by two members of Life Space.

The latest raids were triggered by suspicion that cult members failed to dispose of the body properly, according to Jiji Press and Japan Broadcasting Corp, a crime punishable by up to three years in prison.

Cult member Kenji Kobayashi, 31, son of the dead man in the hotel room, said at the time that he was "confident my father was alive until he was taken away" by police.