Monday, June 4, 2012

Got Their Men...and Woman

courtesy of Sublight Monster
from Flickr
Monday June 4, 9:48 p.m.

After a week of horror, the cops finally caught the criminals:

Luka Magnotta, the Body Parts murderer
Christopher Husbands, the Eaton Centre shooter

Naoko Kikuchi

For those in Toronto and Canada, the first two names should be fairly familiar by this time. But who is this Naoko Kikuchi? Well, she was one of the three at-large Aum Shinrikyo members who helped perpetrate the 1995 sarin attacks in the Tokyo subway system. After 17 years on the run, she was finally caught in an apartment in Sagamihara City, Kanagawa Prefecture last night. Some months earlier, one of her other compatriots, Makoto Hirata, had also been arrested, which now leaves just 54-year-old Katsuya Takahashi as the sole Aum member left on the lam. For years and years, I'd been seeing that poster with all three on subway station malls to such an extent that they looked like permanent decorations. Now it looks like the chapter may be coming to a close. As for the big guy himself, the self-proclaimed guru Shoko Asahara, he's still lingering on Death Row, years after being convicted of masterminding some of the most heinous crimes on Japanese soil.

As for Magnotta and Husbands, I'm hoping for eventual justice.