Japanese police have arrested the final suspect in the 1995 nerve gas attack in Tokyo that had left 13 people dead and thousand others injured.

The arrest on Friday morning of Katsuya Takahashi, a member of a religious cult, brings to an end a 17-year police hunt for those behind the co-ordinated release of poisonous sarin gas in the Japanese capital’s subway system.

Police descended on a comic book cafe in southern Tokyo after being tipped off that a man fitting Katsuya’s description was there, a spokesman told the AFP news agency.

“Detectives asked him to come voluntarily to a nearby police station,” the spokesman said, adding that officers subsequently “arrested Takahashi after his fingerprints matched” those in police records.

According to a Japanese newswire, Takahashi, 54, had been arrested on suspicion of murder and other charges. He told interrogators he had acted “under orders from [the cult's] top officers”.

A high-profile manhunt had been under way in and around the capital since the arrest less than two weeks ago of Naoko Kikuchi, 40, a former member of the Aum Supreme Truth cult.

Both Kikuchi and Takahashi had been on the run since the attack that formed part of a doomsday vision by the cult’s founder.