RKMBs Forums .::Important::. Politics and Current Events Russian doomsday sect threatens mass suicide

Russian doomsday sect threatens mass suicide
David Batty | November 15

Guardian - More than 30 members of a Christian doomsday cult have barricaded themselves inside a remote cave in central Russia to await the end of the world, local officials said today.

The cult members, who include 29 adults and four children, have threatened to commit suicide if police intervene, according to the local prosecutor's office in the Penza region of central Russia.

"They have covered the entrance and refuse to come out, and are threatening to blow themselves up," an official told Reuters.

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"They threaten to detonate a gas tank and blow themselves up. No one wants to take on the responsibility of provoking them ... because our information is that there are children among them."

A police patrol is guarding the snow-covered hillside, where the cult has been dug in since November 7, to prevent anyone provoking them.

The cult members are believed to have taken food and fuel supplies in with them and Russian television showed smoke or steam coming out of a hole in the ravine where they are holed up.

"They are simple Christians," a local priest, Father Georgy, told NTV television station. "They say, 'The church is doing a bad job, the end of the world is coming soon and we are all saving ourselves'."

The cult members believe the world will end sometime in May next year, according to Russian media reports. Police expected them to emerge when their supplies ran out.

Izvestia newspaper said the police had detained the leader of the cult, Pyotr Kuznetsov, whom it described as a 43-year-old with schizophrenia.

The newspaper said police took Kuznetsov, who has been sleeping in a coffin in the last few months, to the cave to persuade his followers to come out, but without success.



adrena November 15, 2007 - 10:02am
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another article I could not copy said that the members of the sect believe that they will be in charge of the afterlife.. and who goes to heaven. and who goes to hell.

I refuse to believe that our universe was so badly designed like that.

Didn't the Seventh Day Adventists start out sort of this way?

Talk about your great disappointments!

It's sort of disappointing that kids have to be shanghaied into their parents wacky beliefs and perhaps paying for those beliefs with their lives. Which goes to show that yeah, sometimes the state does have to interfere with personal faith for the sake of public safety and the safety of the believers kids. So it's not at all unlike the other thread we have about sex Education.

Poor kids.