Briefly

JAPAN

4 Aum members held in beating death

TOKYO — Two male and two female members of the Aum Shinrikyo doomsday sect were arrested yesterday on charges of beating a woman to death with bamboo swords in a kind of exorcism to erase her “bad karma,” Tokyo police said.

The Aum group gained notoriety in 1995 when followers spread sarin nerve gas in a Tokyo subway, killing 12 persons and injuring thousands.

Police arrested Yuko Kitazawa, 40, Masataka Fujibayashi, 35, Yoko Takahashi, 42, and a 16-year-old girl whose name was withheld because she is a minor, the spokeswoman said.

News reports said they bludgeoned the woman in a Tokyo apartment on Sept. 10 and told police next day that she had died of a disease. Police initially did not suspect foul play, but Mr. Fujibayashi later came to police and admitted the group had battered the woman, Jiji Press said.

NORTH KOREA

Ties with U.S. hold key to job plan

KAESONG — The success of a business park being built here by North and South Korea six miles north of the demilitarized zone separating the two Koreas may rest on better ties between Washington and Pyongyang, visiting South Korean officials said.

The industrial park will allow South Korean firms to benefit from cheap labor in the North, but is threatened by the lingering nuclear crisis on the peninsula. “The key lies in improvement of relations between North Korea and the United States,” South Korean lawmaker Kim Han-kil told reporters.

An initial 15 South Korean firms plan to build factories for completion by the end of this year at the park, which could employ more than 700,000 North Koreans and 100,000 South Koreans in 1,000 factories about nine years from now, South Korea’s Unification Ministry said.

PITCAIRN ISLAND

Verdicts due Monday in child-rape trial

SYDNEY, Australia — A Pitcairn Island court hearing on underage sex and rape charges against descendants of the 18th century Bounty mutineers adjourned yesterday and will issue verdicts on Monday, press reports from the remote island said.

Two of the seven men changed their pleas to guilty during the trial, which heard that island men had raped girls as young as 12, believing underage sex was a tradition dating back to 1790 when the English mutineers arrived with their Tahitian women.

Sentencing of those found guilty is likely to take another week, a reporter from the Australian newspaper said yesterday from Pitcairn, halfway between New Zealand and Panama. The seven men, half the island’s adult male population, faced 55 charges of rape and underage sex dating back more than 40 years.

Weekly notes …

Gen. Liang Guanglie, China’s top military officer, will make his first visit to the United States next week for talks with senior American officers, a U.S. Defense Department official said yesterday. During his five-day stay in the United States starting Monday, Gen. Liang is to meet at the Pentagon with Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The United States and China also are arranging for Gen. Liang to visit several U.S. bases. … The Philippines’ military convened a military court yesterday to try two army generals accused of corruption. Maj. Gen. Carlos Garcia, the military’s former finance manager, was suspended last month after anti-graft officials found his assets of nearly $3 million to be far out of proportion to his monthly salary of about $700. In a separate case, Maj. Gen. Ralph Flores is accused of falsifying his service records to avoid mandatory retirement upon reaching age 56.

From wire dispatches and staff reports