By RIA Novosti
Penza Region (Russia) : Russian special forces in Penza region have worked out a plan to flush out a group of doomsday cult members from a cave where they have been for over a month waiting for the end of the planet, a newspaper reported Tuesday.
The sect members went underground in order to “save themselves during the time of the apocalypse,” which they say will come in May 2008.
Apocalypse, in Greek, means revelation of hidden things and today the term is often used to mean the end of planet earth.
The group comprises 29 people, including four children, the youngest being less than eighteen months old. They have threatened to set fire to themselves if any attempt is made to force them to come out of the tunnel.
Special force officers with rescue dogs spent Monday thoroughly exploring the ravine where the cave is located, and a plan of action has been formulated and presented, the Russian newspaper Tvoi Den said.
“The underground shelter is three to four meters deep,” said an officer. “When the sect members enter into negotiations, their voices sound as if they are coming from deep down,”
The cave is said to have been divided into five cells, with one large ‘room’ set aside for prayers. According to the sect’s founder Pyotr Kuznetsov, the prayer room is to be used for the eventual burial of the sect members.
Kuznetsov is currently being treated for paranoid schizophrenia in an asylum in Penza, about 600 km southeast of Moscow.
“This shows that the sect are not planning to come to the surface in May, as Kuznetsov said. Those people knew when they went underground that it was forever,” a source close to the investigation said.
Media reports also said the sect’s prayer room contained a coffin, in which Kuznetsov and his followers would often sleep in it to prepare themselves for death.