Tag: Russia

Seventy members of an Islamic sect who have been living in an underground bunker without heat or sunlight for nearly a decade have been discovered living on the outskirts of the city of Kazan in Russia, local media reported.

The sect members included 20 children many of whom had never seen daylight until the prosecutors discovered their dwelling on August 1 and sent them for health checks.

A regional court in Moscow has upheld a lower court decision made in June 2011, declaring books published by the Church of Scientology to be extremist literature and banning publication or distribution of books from Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard.

The decision does not ban the controversial cult.

A Russian court has dismissed a call to ban an edition of the Hindu holy book Bhagvad Gita, in a case that triggered protests in India.

Prosecutors in the Siberian city of Tomsk wanted the edition to be ruled “extremist”.

Moscow police have been searching the Church of Scientology on Taganskaya Street since Thursday morning.

According to a source who spoke to Russian news agency Interfax, “The search could be part of a criminal investigation by the Moscow region’s Investigative Committee into the distribution of scientology literature of the extremist nature.”

Russian MPs have backed a bill that bans anyone who calls themselves a witch or a wizard from advertising their services in the media in an effort to combat a controversial national obsession with the occult.

According to the Orthodox Church, Russia has 800,000 practitioners of the occult, many of whom advertise in newspaper small advertisements offering cures for alcoholism and spells to lift curses and return errant husbands for a fee.

One report claims almost one in five Russians have consulted occult €˜healers’ but MPs have warned they are risking their health and possibly their lives by trusting in such quackery.

A four-year-old boy has died during an exorcism ritual carried out by a traditional healer in the Far East of Russia, investigators say.

The boy apparently suffocated during the ritual, after healers held him face-down to the ground.

The Supreme Court rejected an appeal against a previous court ruling of the Rostov regional court issued on September 11, 2009, which declares the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ branch in the southern Russian city of Taganrog an extremist organization and bans its activities.

A plot of land, an office building and other property belonging to the group were also seized.