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Corpse stench drives Russian doomsday cult from cave: officials
2008-05-16
Toxic fumes from rotting corpses drove the final members of a Russian doomsday cult from the cave where they had been waiting six months for the end of the world, officials said Friday. Eight women and one man emerged from the muddy bunker outside a village in the region of Penza, 560 kilometres (350 miles) southeast of Moscow, said Tatyana Ostrovskaya, a spokeswoman for the local prosecutor's office. "The last nine people came to the surface after the bodies of two women were found," Ostrovskaya told AFP. Interfax news agency quoted local official Vladimir Provotorov as saying that everyone left because there was "a real threat of poisoning from toxic corpse fumes" from two deceased cult members rotting in the cave. "We could smell it through the ventilation shaft," he was quoted by RIA Novosti news agency as saying. "When the specialists took out the dead hermits, we asked the others if they would like to leave, and they agreed." The cultists were part of an ultra-Orthodox Christian splinter group, led by bearded guru Pyotr Kuznetsov, who reject the modern world and believe that bar codes on food products are a symbol of the devil. In November, 35 members followed Kuznetsov's orders to take refuge in the frozen underground labyrinth as he predicted the world would end on Orthodox Easter Sunday, April 27. Taking candles, icons and headscarves, they threatened to blow themselves up with cooking gas canisters if authorities interfered. After surviving the bitter Russian winter, fourteen emerged on April 1, including all four children, when part of their subterranean shelter collapsed in what they took to be a sign from God. Officials blamed water from melting snow. Several others abandoned the cave in the following weeks as more chunks of the mud roof collapsed. Kuznetsov himself waited above ground in a nearby wooden shack before he was committed to a psychiatric hospital with a diagnosis of schizophrenia. After the world failed to end on schedule, Kuznetsov was found trying to commit suicide. No journalists appear to have been present on Friday when the cult members left their cave or to have had contact with them since. On Thursday night journalists were kept away from the cave as several cars arrived at the site, NTV television reported. A sound engineer for the station who was keeping watch was beaten by members of the security forces, NTV said. Those who emerged from the cave alive "are now being looked at by a doctor," Penza's deputy governor Oleg Melnichenko told the TV station. Three are citizens of Belarus, RIA Novosti reported. Later, television pictures showed the mangled remains of one of the two dead women caked in mud and decomposing body parts wrapped in sheets after their excavation. A member of the cult who had emerged earlier told ITAR-TASS that one had died after a severe fast, the other from an unknown illness. "We are examining the bodies to see if we will open a criminal case," said prosecutor's office spokeswoman Tatyana Ostrovskaya. Most of the sect members who left the cave earlier continue to await the end of the world at Kuznetsov's wooden cottage in the nearby village of Nikolskoye.
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