U.S. Offices of Japanese Sect Under Surveillance

NEW YORK —  The American headquarters here of the Japanese religious sect Aum Supreme Truth has been under law enforcement scrutiny since the group surfaced as the leading suspect in the release of deadly nerve gas in Tokyo’s subway system.

Subha, the office manager, said Thursday she spoke with Shoko Asahara, the sect’s founder, after the subway attack and he strongly denied any involvement by the group. She declined to discuss the conversation further.

“From now on I have to fight to create sound public opinion,” she said at the group’s headquarters, a two-bedroom apartment on the second floor of a grimy, small six-story building a block from Rockefeller Center in Manhattan.

“I don’t want this to happen again,” she said. “I have to purify our world mentally and physically for the benefit of the people. That is the teaching of Buddhism.”

An FBI spokesman, Joseph Valiquette, refused to say if federal agents are investigating the sect. But it was known that authorities had the building under surveillance.

Aum Supreme Truth maintains two apartments in the building on East 48th Street near Fifth Avenue, and has about 100 followers across the United States, sect officials said.

Pictures of Asahara in spiritual poses and in fuchsia robes line walls of the headquarters, which contains a separate kitchen and meditation room. In the worn beige-carpeted room, a man meditated to taped chanting. He knelt close to an altar covered in purple cloth with pictures of the group’s founder above the shrine. The room also contained a television and videotape recorder.

A neighbor said Asahara--whom Japanese police are seeking to question--visited the United States within the last six months and he recognized him from one of the posters.

Manuel Barraza, who operates a tailor shop next door, said he hemmed Asahara’s blue jeans. Immigration records do not show the sect’s leader entering this country in that period, but authorities said he could have used another name. Barraza also said group members were quiet and kept to themselves.

Subha said the apartment is the sect’s only center in the United States and had been in operation for seven or eight years.

Goldman is The Times’ New York Bureau chief and Olen is a special correspondent.