Chaos as Nazi nerve gas fells commuters

Tokyo stunned as hi-tech terror poisons thousands

The stunned people of Tokyo stood in thrall to a new, hi-tech terror last night after six tube train commuters and two staff died and almost 4,700 were hurt in the first targeting of a modern city with deadly nerve gas .

Tokyo police said 76 people were in critical condition at hospitals, while 46 others were in serious condition, mostly with respiratory problems.

As a huge hunt began for the culprits, it emerged that both the Japanese and United States authorities had been warned last year that an attack could be coming on the Tokyo Metro with the Nazi-developed nerve gas sarin, that has been called 'the poor man's atom bomb'.

American chemical warfare specialists visited the central Japanese city of Matsumoto, where eight people died and 200 were seriously poisoned last June, when sarin gas seeped through open windows of homes one evening. They warned the Pentagon, the CIA, the White House and the Japanese authorities that this had been a deliberate test, and that the Tokyo mass transit system was the logical next target.

Four crude humidifier-type devices, equipped with fans and vents to try to disperse the sarin liquid as an even deadlier vapour, were found by police on trains running on three separate lines of the vast Tokyo subway system yesterday.

Between 8.17am and 8.50am Tokyo time (just before 11pm on Sunday in Britain), the five targeted trains spilled out thousands of choking, retching passengers. The worst affected remained in the trains, foaming at the mouth, blinded and paralysed as the gas affected their central nervous systems.

Sixteen Metro stations and three of the city's main Metro lines were closed as army chemical warfare defence teams plunged underground to remove the gas dispensers.

The international implications of the Tokyo attack had the national security council at the White House cancelling all other meetings to review the evidence yesterday.

'Anyone with a college degree in chemistry could make sarin, but the trick is to keep it stable enough to put it in a delivery system,' said Kyle Olsen, of the Chemical and Biological Arms Control Institute in Washington, who issued the warnings to US and Japanese authorities after investigating the earlier Matsumoto incident.

'It was clear to me that it was a carefully planned attack,' Dr Olsen said yesterday. 'In the absence of any meaningful target, I concluded that this was a test run for a serious attack. And I concluded that there was no better target than the Tokyo metro system.

At first yesterday, the assumption in Tokyo was that some dreadful accident had occurred. Then the gas was initially wrongly identified - in part by the smell and the symptoms of the injured - as methyl cyanide. Only when the attacks had stopped was it realised that the city had been deliberately hit by a concerted terror attack with sarin.

First developed by Nazi scientists, sarin and its derivative Tabun are the most common nerve gases in the world's arsenals. Both US and Russian stockpiles contain thousands of tons of the stuff, samples of which are kept for research at Porton Down.

As the police finally established the chronology of the alerts from various Tokyo subway stations, matching them against train timetables, they found 16 stations had been hit on three lines, all within the space of 25 minutes.

The Tokyo subway system, the world's busiest, most punctual and hitherto the safest, was yesterday in chaos. No one has claimed responsibility for what police called 'a case virtually unparalleled in the history of crime in this country'.

The worst affected stations included those at Kasumigaseki, near the main government ministries, where all three affected lines meet Kokkaigijidomae, which serves parliament Tsukiji, near the wholesale fish market and Ebisu, site of a huge office and shopping complex.

Last week, a subway station worker found a briefcase emitting smoke at Kasumigaseki. Police found the case contained a humidifier with electric coils to look as if it were a bomb, but were not sure if it was a prank or the work of extremists. Two other similar cases were found at exits and about 5,000 passengers were evacuated.

In retrospect, this may have been a test run by the nerve gas terrorists. In the containers that leaked the deadly fluid yesterday, US sources in Washington said Japanese officials had told them that 'devices with fans and vents' had been found.

Although sarin is toxic in liquid form, it does far more damage when dispersed as a vapour. US anti-terrorist officials said the humidifiers could have been a crude dispersal device.

'We believe the gas to be sarin,' said Shigeaki Hinohara, chief doctor at St Luke's Hospital at Tsukiji in eastern Tokyo , one of 105 hospitals to which victims were taken. Another doctor said the symptoms were 'impaired and tunnel vision, vomiting, headaches and breathing problems'.

Hospitals were inundated as victims were rushed in. One commuter, who recovered quickly when give oxygen, said: 'I could hardly breathe or speak when I reached the hospital, nor control my hands.'

Other victims said that they felt chest pains, or headaches, or suddenly could not see.

'I'd like to kill whoever did this,' said the younger brother of one of the victims, Takako Iwata, aged 32. 'But then, my loving sister will never return.'

Eyewitnesses said variously that they had seen a man with a mask or a man with sunglasses leaving mysterious packages on trains or at stations. The containers ranged from glass and plastic bottles to what looked like two aluminium lunch boxes.

In the morning rush hour, such boxes would not have caused suspicion, not least because the trains are packed to 200 or 300 per cent of normal capacity. Tokyo 's subway trains carry 2.7 billion passengers a year, and are the main means of transport.

Tokyo commuters are expected to stay away from the lines today, spring equinox day and a national holiday. Even so, Metro officials removed all litter cans from the 150 stations as a precautionary measure.