Deep Politics Forum

Quote:Russian Islamist sect kept children underground for a decade

Children from sect led by self-proclaimed prophet Faizrakhman Satarov found by police investigating murder of moderate cleric

Associated Press in Moscow

guardian.co.uk, Thursday 9 August 2012 14.07 BST

A self-proclaimed prophet had a vision from God. He would build an Islamic caliphate under the earth.

The digging began about a decade ago, and 70 followers soon moved into an eight-level subterranean labyrinth of cramped cells with no light, heat or ventilation.

Children were born. They too lived in the underground cells for many years until authorities raided the compound last week and freed the 27 sons and daughters of the sect.

Aged between one and 17, the children rarely saw the light of day and had never left the property, been to school or seen a doctor, officials said on Wednesday. Their parents sect members who call themselves muammin, from the Arabic for believers were charged with child abuse.

The sect's 83-year-old founder, Faizrakhman Satarov, who declared himself a prophet in contradiction to the principles of Islam, was charged with negligence, according to Irina Petrova, the deputy prosecutor in Kazan, the provincial capital of Tatarstan province.

The children were discovered when police searched the sect's grounds as part of an investigation into the recent killing of a top Tatarstan Muslim cleric, an attack local officials have blamed on radical Islamist groups that have flourished in the oil-rich Volga river province.

Satarov ordered his followers to live in cells dug under a three-storey brick house topped by a small minaret adorned with a tin crescent moon. Only a few sect members were allowed to leave the premises to work as traders at a local market, Russian media reported.

The children were examined in hospital and will live temporarily in an orphanage, a paediatrician, Tatyana Moroz, said. "They looked nourished but dirty, so we had to wash them," she said in televised remarks.

Their parents expressed concern about the children's medical treatment. Doctors "can do anything to them", Fana Sayanova told local television.

The decrepit house, which stands on a 700 square metre plot of land, was built illegally and will be demolished, Tatarstan police said.

"They will come with bulldozers and guns, but they will have to demolish this house over our dead bodies," the sect member Gumer Ganiyev said on the Vesti television channel. The ailing Satarov appointed Ganiyev as his deputy, according to local media.

Satarov had followers in several other cities in Tatarstan and other Volga river provinces, local media reported.

In a 2008 interview with the Komsomolskaya Pravda daily, he said that he had fallen out with other clerics and authorities in the communist era, when he said the KGB sent him to Muslim nations with stories about religious freedom in the officially atheist Soviet Union. Government-approved Orthodox Christian, Muslim and Jewish clerics routinely travelled abroad on Soviet publicity trips.

"That's how I became Satan's servant, a traitor," Satarov was quoted as saying. "When I understood that, I repented and started preaching."

Muslim leaders in Tatarstan said Satarov's views contradicted Islamic doctrine.

"Islam postulates that there are no other prophets after Mohammad," the Kazan-based theologian Rais Suleimanov told the Gazeta.ru online newspaper.

Police raided Satarov's house last Friday as part of an investigation into the killing of Valiulla Yakupov, Tatarstan's deputy chief mufti, who was shot dead in mid-July as he left his house in Kazan. The chief mufti Ildus Faizov was wounded in the legs minutes after the shooting in a bomb blast targeting his car.

Both clerics were known as critics of radical Islamist groups that advocate a strict and puritanical version of Islam known as Salafism.

Prosecutors investigating Yakupov's killing have named two suspects, who remain at large. Five other people have been arrested.