Only seven years into her marriage did Yuki Niimi first touch her husband -- at a morgue where she collected his body after he was executed

and kissed him in a coffin.

Before that a glass screen had always separated her from her death-row spouse Tomomitsu Niimi, a notorious member of the Aum Shinrikyo doomsday cult that 30 years ago orchestrated a nerve agent attack on Japan's capital.

On March 20, 1995, Aum members released sarin on five Tokyo subway trains, killing 14 people and sickening thousands more.

"Until the very end, he gave no apology to those who died. He didn't regret what he did. He just followed the path he believed in," Yuki, 47, told AFP in an interview.

Yuki herself is a former member of an Aum successor group who despite her denials was once convicted for using intimidation to try to recruit an acquaintance for the sect.

Given the magnitude of her husband's crimes, she believes the death penalty was "unavoidable", and that "paying restitution" is the only way Aum cultists can atone.

Under the thrall of the wild-haired, near-blind guru Shoko Asahara, Aum devotees believed Armageddon was coming and saw massacres as an altruistic way to elevate souls to a higher realm.

Disaffected young people in Japan, including doctors and engineers who later manufactured toxins, took solace in........

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