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


  • World
  • Tuesday, 01 Jul 2025

FILE PHOTO: 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. Picture taken August 18, 2010. REUTERS/Ilya Naymushin/File Photo

(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.

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