WICKED MAN KEPT CHILDREN UNDERGROUND FOR 10YEARS

This is perhaps the longest post I ever put up here but it's worth going through cause it's a very pathetic story and I bet it will hit headlines shortly...

A self-proclaimed prophet had a vision from God. He would build an Islamic caliphate under the earth.

The digging began about a decade ago, and 70 followers soon moved into an eight-level subterranean labyrinth of cramped cells with no light, heat or ventilation.

Children were born. They too lived in the underground cells for many years – until authorities raided the compound last week and freed the 27 sons and daughters of the sect.

Aged between one and 17, the children rarely saw the light of day and had never left the property, been to school or seen a doctor, officials said on Wednesday. Their parents – sect members who call themselves muammin, from the Arabic for believers – were charged with child abuse.

The sect's 83-year-old founder, Faizrakhman Satarov, who declared himself a prophet in contradiction to the principles of Islam, was charged with negligence, according to Irina Petrova, the deputy prosecutor in Kazan, the provincial capital of Tatarstan province.

The children were discovered when police searched the sect's grounds as part of an investigation into the recent killing of a top Tatarstan Muslim cleric, an attack local officials have blamed on radical Islamist groups that have flourished in the oil-rich Volga river province.

Satarov ordered his followers to live in cells dug under a three-storey brick house topped by a small minaret adorned with a tin crescent moon. Only a few sect members were allowed to leave the premises to work as traders at a local market, Russian media reported.

The children were examined in hospital and will live temporarily in an orphanage, a paediatrician, Tatyana Moroz, said. "They looked nourished but dirty, so we had to wash them," she said in televised remarks.

Their parents expressed concern about the children's medical treatment. Doctors "can do anything to them", a source said.

The decrepit house, which stands on a 700 square metre plot of land, was built illegally and will be demolished, Tatarstan police said.

"They will come with bulldozers and guns, but they will have to demolish this house over our dead bodies," the sect member Gumer Ganiyev said on the Vesti television channel. The ailing Satarov appointed Ganiyev as his deputy, according to local media.

"Islam postulates that there are no other prophets after Mohammad," the Kazan-based theologian Rais Suleimanov said.

I'm sure he has a back-up somewhere. Where does he get what he uses to take care of the people since only a few people are allowed to go trade in the market. This man I know for sure has some people behind him. There's nothing wrong is having a religion but everything is wrong when you violate the right of others...so wrong.