MOSCOW (Reuters) - 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 said Thursday.
"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 told Reuters by telephone. "They threaten to detonate a gas tank and blow themselves up."
The cult members, who include 29 adults and four children, are hidden inside a snow-covered hillside in the Penza region of central Russia. A Penza police spokeswoman said they had moved into the dug-out on November 7.
"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 simple Christians," a local priest, Father Georgy, told NTV television. "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 run out.
After decades of state-enforced atheism under Soviet rule, many Russians and other ex-Soviet nationals have come under the influence of homegrown and foreign sects. Izvestia newspaper said the leader of the cult, Pyotr Kuznetsov, had been detained by police. It said he was a 43-year-old who had been diagnosed with schizophrenia and that in the last few months he had been sleeping in a coffin.
Somebody cue REM
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