MOSCOW // A reclusive sect that literally went underground to stop contact with the outside world kept 27 children in dark and unheated cells, many of them for more than a decade, prosecutors said yesterday. The children have been freed and the parents charged with child abuse.
Some of the children, aged between 1 and 17, have never seen daylight, health officials said. The sect's 83-year-old founder Faizrakhman Satarov, who declared himself a Muslim prophet in contradiction with the principles of Islam, has also been charged with negligence, Irina Petrova, deputy prosecutor in the provincial capital of Kazan, said.
No members of the sect, who call themselves "muammin" after the Arabic term that means "believers," have been arrested, she said.
The children were discovered last week when police searched the sect grounds as part of a probe into the recent killing of a top Tatarstan Muslim cleric, an attack local officials blame on radical Islamist groups that have mushroomed in the province.
Satarov, a former top imam in the neighbouring province of Bashkortostan, declared his house outside Kazan an independent Islamic state. He ordered some 70 followers to live in cells they dug under the three-story building topped by a small minaret 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 have been placed in local hospitals for observation and will temporarily live in an orphanage, paediatrician Tatyana Moroz said in televised remarks.
The cramped cells, without ventilation, heating or electricity, form eight levels under a decrepit three-story brick house. The house was built illegally and will be demolished, Tatarstan police told local media.
"They will come with bulldozers and guns, but they can demolish this house over our dead bodies!" sect member Gumer Ganiyev said on the Vesti television channel. The ailing Satarov appointed Ganiyev as his deputy "prophet," according to local media.
Satarov had followers in several other cities in Tatarstan and other Volga River provinces, local media reported.
Muslim leaders in Tatarstan said Satarov's views contradict their dogma.
"Islam postulates that there are no other prophets after Mohammad," Kazan-based theologian Rais Suleimanov told the Gazeta.ru online publication on Tuesday. "The teachings of Satarov, who declared himself a prophet, have been rejected by traditional Muslims."
Police entered Satarov's house last Friday as part of an ongoing investigation into the killing of Valiulla Yakupov, Tatarstan's deputy chief mufti, who was gunned down in mid-July as he left his house in Kazan. Minutes later, chief mufti Ildus Faizov was wounded in the legs after an explosive device ripped through his car in central Kazan.
Both clerics were known as critics of radical Islamist groups that advocate Salafism - a strict and puritan version of Islam.