Fourteen members of a Russian doomsday cult on Tuesday abandoned the remote underground bunker where they had been hiding for nearly half a year awaiting the end of the world.
A local official said the cult members believed God had sent them a sign to come to the surface when part of their dugout collapsed. Another 14 people were still underground but officials were hopeful they too would come out.
”All are in good health, considering they have spent half a year underground,” said Oleg Melnichenko, deputy governor of the Penza region where members have been holed up since October.
”They have refused medical attention and are now in a house, praying, where they say they will stay until Orthodox Easter [on April 27] … They said that God had given them a signal to leave after the fourth partial cave-in.”
The group that emerged from the bunker on Tuesday included two girls aged eight and 12.
Melnichenko said the remaining 14 members were in another chamber that had been cut off from the exit by the cave-in and that negotiations were continuing to persuade them to leave.
A Reuters reporter who crawled down into the now empty section of the bunker found a makeshift kitchen and sleeping space hollowed out of the earth. Among the belongings left behind were a chess set and pages from a children’s book.
The cult members had been refusing to come out of their bunker before the apocalypse, which their leader Pavel Kuznetsov — now undergoing psychiatric treatment — had predicted would happen in April or May this year.
They threatened to blow up gas canisters in their bunker if police tried to bring them out by force.
Seven female cult members left the dugout at the weekend after meltwater caused part of the earth structure to collapse.
All the cult members who have emerged from the bunker were being kept in cottages owned by their group in a nearby village. Police were preventing reporters from speaking to them.
Work of Satan
The sect is a splinter group of the Russian Orthodox church. They reject processed food and say bar codes on products are the work of Satan.
Officials had for weeks been trying to persuade the cult members to come out, negotiating through a ventilation shaft. They brought self-declared prophet Kuznetsov, and an Orthodox priest, to help with negotiations.
Kuznetsov did not join his followers in the bunker, saying God had different tasks for him.
To get into the part of the bunker not cut off by the cave-in, the Reuters reporter crawled on hands and knees through a muddy tunnel that stretched about 5m.
The tunnel opened out into a chamber large enough to stand upright in.
Somebody had carved out large images of flowers and plants on the walls and cardboard covered the floor.
When the group of 14 emerged on Tuesday they took some of their supplies out with them, including jars of pickled tomatoes and mushrooms, plastic containers of cooking oil, dried pasta and a large band-saw. – Reuters