Russian authorities have arrested an accused cult chief who claims to be the reincarnation of Jesus after a serious operation to extract him from the group he runs in Siberia.
Sergey Anatolyevitch Torop, 59, was arrested Tuesday in Krasnoyarsk, Siberia, based on Russia’s Investigative Committee. The police officer-turned-mystic had been dwelling in Siberia for many years as chief of the Church of the Final Testomony, a pseudo-Christian commune with greater than 4,000 members.
Torop’s followers typically referred to as him “Jesus of Siberia” or “Vissarion Christ the Instructor” — to not be confused with Viserion the dragon from Game of Thrones.
He was arrested on a number of prices, together with founding an unlawful spiritual group, extorting cash from his followers and subjecting folks to emotional abuse and grievous bodily hurt, officers mentioned.
His lieutenants Vadim Redkin, who’s a former Soviet-era rocker, and Vladimir Vedernikov have been additionally arrested.
Video launched by Russian authorities reveals Torop, with lengthy gray hair and a beard, being loaded into an plane alongside along with his two aides after his arrest. A number of masked commandoes could be seen escorting the suspects.
Sergey Torop is proven on this picture from video captured on Sept. 22, 2020, in Siberia, Russia.
Russia Investigative Committee/YouTube
“To be able to extract revenue from spiritual actions, they attracted funds from residents and in addition used psychological violence in opposition to them,” investigators mentioned in a Russian information launch. “On account of extended publicity, a few of the followers of the spiritual group suffered critical hurt to their well being.”
Witnesses say a big safety staff confirmed as much as arrest Torop at one of many hamlets in his commune.
Russia’s Federal Safety Service (FSB), the successor to the KGB, additionally helped with the arrest.
Members of the Church of the Final Testomony are proven at their commune in Siberia on Sept. 9, 2020.
Vadim Redkin/Fb
Torop misplaced his job as a visitors cop in 1989 and located Jesus in a mirror two years later, simply earlier than the autumn of the Soviet Union. He began his church on the declare that Jesus was watching Earth from orbit, then finally claimed to be Jesus himself, The Guardian studies.
“I felt one thing violently surging up from inside me that had been held down till then,” he mentioned in 2009, when an AFP reporter requested about his come-to-be-Jesus second.
He and hundreds of followers established a colony in a distant a part of Siberia, the place they lived for roughly three many years earlier than the federal government operation on Tuesday.
“I’m not God. And it’s a mistake to see Jesus as God. However I’m the dwelling phrase of God the daddy,” he advised The Guardian in a 2002 interview. “Every thing that God desires to say, he says by means of me.”
Images and movies from the commune present easy picket houses, grime roads and other people in white clothes.
The Church of the Final Testomony’s website options many lectures from Torop. The latest ones are dated “60 A.R.,” which seems to consult with “After the Resurrection” of “Jesus.”
The positioning describes Torop’s writings because the “Final Testomony.” Redkin additionally seems to have penned a number of spiritual texts for the motion, that are referred to as “Vadim’s Chronicles.”
The group’s beliefs embody a mishmash of Buddhist, Russian Orthodox, apocalyptic and environmentally acutely aware concepts, as they clarify in a preferred VICE documentary from 2012. Additionally they imagine in aliens.
Torop styled himself after fashionable pictures of Jesus, pictures captured over time present. He wore his hair lengthy, grew a scraggly beard and sometimes wearing white robes.
On this file picture, ‘Vissarion the Instructor,’ or ‘Jesus of Siberia,’ Russian ex-traffic cop Sergei Torop meets along with his followers within the distant village of Petropavlovka on Aug. 18, 2009.
ALEXANDER NEMENOV/AFP by way of Getty Photographs
The group reportedly noticed a big inflow of latest followers this yr amid the coronavirus pandemic, based on the Moscow Times.
“Requests to affix us have tripled because the begin of the virus,” Redkin advised the paper in Could. “Persons are trying to find one thing and have turn out to be interested in our life-style. They’re searching for a method out of isolation and loneliness.”
Redkin talked about that the group was below investigation in a Facebook post on Sept. 9.
The three suspects might resist 12 years in jail if convicted on the costs.
—With information from Reuters
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