Russia jails 'Jesus of Siberia' sect leader for 12 years for harming followers

The former traffic policeman attracted thousands of disciples and many moved to remote corner of Siberia to worship him

Vissarion, who has proclaimed himself a new Christ, conducts a service during the "Holiday of Good Fruit" feast in a village southeast of Russia's Siberian city of Krasnoyarsk, August 18, 2010. REUTERS

A Russian sect leader who claimed he was Jesus Christ reincarnated was sentenced to 12 years in a prison camp on Monday after being convicted of harming his followers' health and financial affairs.

Sergei Torop, a former traffic policeman known to his followers as 'Vissarion', set up the Church of the Last Testament in a remote but picturesque part of Siberia's Krasnoyarsk region in 1991, the year the Soviet Union broke up.

A bearded self-styled mystic with long hair, he claimed to have been "reborn" to convey the word of God and attracted thousands of followers, some of whom flocked to live in a settlement known as the "Abode of Dawn" or "Sun City", at a time when Russia was battling poverty and lawlessness.

Torop, 64, told his followers, who regularly intoned prayers in his honour as they looked up to his large hilltop residence, not to eat meat, not to smoke, not to drink alcohol or swear, and to stop using money.

But the Investigative Committee, Russia's equivalent of the U.S. FBI, accused Torop and two aides of using psychological pressure to extract money from his followers and of causing serious harm to their mental and physical health.

In a statement on Monday, a court in the Siberian city of Novosibirsk said it had convicted the three men, sentencing Torop and Vladimir Vedernikov to 12 years and Vadim Redkin to 11 years in a maximum-security prison camp.

They were also ordered to pay 40 million roubles ($511,500) to compensate their victims for "moral damage".

All three denied wrongdoing.

Torop and the two aides were arrested in a security forces raid by helicopter in 2020 that involved the FSB security service, the successor agency to the Soviet KGB.

According to the RIA state news agency, investigators said the men had caused "moral harm" to 16 people, serious damage to the physical health of six people, and moderate damage to another person's health.

Vedernikov, one of the aides, had also been accused of committing fraud, RIA said.

In a 2017 BBC documentary, filmmaker Simon Reeve interviewed Torop, who denied any wrongdoing. The film showed how school girls whose parents were his followers were being educated to be what a local teacher called "future brides for worthy men."