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How A Janitor Thwarted The Deadliest Terrorist Attack In History
It was mere seconds away from being successful
In March of 1995, an unidentified cleaning woman in Tokyo, Japan, unwittingly saved thousands of lives. During the course of her normal work, the woman, who has still not been identified nearly 30 years later, found two plastic bags sitting next to a toilet in Shinjuku Station. Shinjuku Station, in the heart of Tokyo, is the busiest train station in the world. An eyewatering 3 million people pass through the station every day.
The janitor thought nothing of the bags. In a station that sees millions of passengers per day, such detritus is common and expected. The woman removed the bags from the bathroom and tossed them into a pile of trash waiting for disposal. When she threw the bags into the trash pile, she had disengaged a sophisticated terrorist device that was programmed to kill thousands of people, perhaps tens of thousands of people.
The bags were filled with dangerous chemicals that were rigged to ignite and create a cloud of cyanide gas that was to be sucked up into the station’s ventilation system and pumped to the millions of passengers flowing through the station. If the devices had been left to ignite on their own, they could have produced a highly dangerous cloud of cyanide gas.
