Russia:At least 30 members of a Russian doomsday cult have barricaded themselves in a remote cave to await the end of the world and are threatening to commit suicide if police intervene, officials and media said yesterday.
"They have covered the entrance and refuse to come out and are threatening to blow themselves up," an official in the local prosecutor's office said.
The cult members, who include 29 adults and four children, are hidden inside a snow-covered hillside in the Penza region of central Russia, where they have been since November 7th. "No one wants to take on the responsibility of provoking them . . . because our information is that there are children among them," said the official.
They are thought to have taken food and fuel supplies in with them and Russian television pictures from the scene showed smoke or steam coming out of a hole in the snow-covered ravine.
"They are simple Christians," a local priest, Fr 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'."
Media reports said the cult members believed the world would end sometime in May next year. Police expected them to emerge when their supplies ran out.
After decades of state-enforced atheism under Soviet rule, many Russians and other ex-Soviet nationals have recently come under the influence of homegrown and foreign sects.
Many have refused new passports and taxpayers' personal identification numbers, saying the figures contained "satanic" combinations of numbers.
Izvestia newspaper said the leader of the cult, Pyotr Kuznetsov (43), had been detained by police. It said he had been diagnosed with schizophrenia and in the last few months had been sleeping in a coffin. Police took Mr Kuznetsov to the cave to persuade his followers to come out, but without success, the newspaper said. - (Reuters)