Tokyo - Japan's police on Wednesday removed children from the bizarre Life Space cult, whose members kept a mummified body at an airport hotel and insisted it was alive, officials and reports said.
With tolerance for such groups already sapped by the Aum Supreme Truth doomsday cult's murderous 1995 gas attack on Tokyo's subway, police launched multiple raids and reportedly took nine children into protection.
Dozens of plain-clothed police investigators were shown on television marching into Life Space buildings in Tokyo and a restaurant called Arts Village in the central city of Nagoya.
Detectives, carrying cardboard boxes to ferry confiscated materials, also raided hotel rooms in the eastern Japan town of Oarai, home to Life Space guru Koji Takahashi, a 62-year-old former tax accountant.
In a television interview, Takahashi was asked about allegations he had separated children from their parents in the cult and taken them abroad to countries such as Spain and the United States.
"They are studying abroad and you can't 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.
Police confirmed they had launched the raids but declined to give further details.
According to a report by Jiji Press news agency, the police found nine children at two of the Life Space sect's Tokyo facilities and took them into protection.
On November 12, police found the mummified body of 66-year-old Shinichi Kobayashi in a hotel room occupied for more than four months by two members of Life Space.
Police searched the room at the Marroad International Hotel in the airport town of Narita near Tokyo at the manager's request.
The latest wave of raids was carried out on suspicion that cult members failed to dispose of the body properly, according to Jiji Press and Japan Broadcasting Corp.
The crime can lead to imprisonment of up to three years under Japanese law.
Thirty-one-year-old cult member Kenji Kobayashi, insisted his father was alive and on his way for a recovery on the day the body was discovered.
Little is known about the Life Space sect, which holds expensive "self-enlightenment" seminars.
Anti-cult lawyer Masaki Kito has said that "during in the 1990s (Life Space guru) Takahashi became more and more influenced by Indian beliefs. I believe we can undoubtedly describe them as religious."
Aum Supreme Truth cult members, led by guru Shoko Asahara, shocked the world when they spread Nazi-invented Sarin gas in Tokyo's subway in March 1995, killing 12 people and injuring thousands.
The cult escaped being outlawed in January 1997 when a legal panel ruled it was no threat to society. But parliament's lower house last week passed legislation cracking down on the sect. - Sapa-AFP