Guatemala finds youngsters taken by Jewish sect after abuse investigation – #INA

Guatemalan authorities have recovered a number of youngsters taken by members of an ultra-orthodox Jewish sect who had damaged right into a care centre the place they had been being held.

Officers stated that members of the Lev Tahor sect had entered the shelter on Sunday in an effort to take again 160 minors who had been taken from the sect’s compound on Friday in a police raid. Authorities accuse the sect of kid sexual abuse.

A number of the youngsters had been discovered on Sunday, whereas others had been recovered early on Monday, in line with the AFP information company.

The farm compound in Oratoria, southwest of Guatemala Metropolis, was raided on Friday by authorities to rescue youngsters and adolescents who “had been allegedly being abused by a member of the Lev Tahor sect”, stated Minister of the Inside Francisco Jimenez.

Nancy Paiz, a prosecutor at Guatemala’s Prosecutor’s Workplace In opposition to Human Trafficking, stated at a information convention : “Based mostly on the statements of the complainants, the proof obtained, and the medical examinations, it was doable to ascertain that there are types of human trafficking in opposition to these minors, similar to pressured marriage, abuse and associated crimes.”

About 100 of the kids’s kin who belong to the sect gathered on Sunday outdoors a care centre in Guatemala Metropolis, the place the kids had been being held, to demand their return.

Sect members then “broke into” the centre at about 4:30pm native time (22:30 GMT), “forcing open the gate and abducting the kids and adolescents sheltered there”, an announcement from the Legal professional Normal’s Workplace stated.

“We would like them to let the kids out of right here,” Uriel Goldman, a consultant of the households, instructed the AFP outdoors the centre earlier than the tried recapture of the minors.

These outdoors the shelter tried to forestall the authorities from bringing again the minors, resulting in some scuffles with police, in line with an AFP photographer on the scene.

With police assist, the centre “managed to find and shield everybody once more”, the Legal professional Normal’s Workplace stated, though the Secretariat of Social Welfare of the Presidency later clarified that some had “evaded” authorities and a search alert has been activated.

Lev Tahor has additionally accused native authorities of spiritual persecution.

“The authorities… inform lies with false accusations,” Goldman stated.

The Lev Tahor group, based in 1988 in Israel, practise an austere type of Judaism with interpretation of Jewish regulation that features lengthy prayer periods and organized marriages.

The group settled in Mexico and Guatemala between 2014 and 2017. In 2022, a Mexican police operation within the southern Mexican state of Chiapas on the Guatemalan border rescued a bunch of youngsters and adolescents from a Lev Tahor camp, whose members had been arrested on suspicions of taking part in abuses in opposition to minors.

The Jewish Neighborhood of Guatemala in an announcement stated the sect was international to its organisation and expressed its assist for Guatemalan authorities in finishing up the required investigations “to guard the lives and integrity of minors and different weak teams that could be in danger”.

It referred to as on the “authorities and diplomatic corps of nations from whose nationalities make up members of Lev Tahor, to hitch forces to guard these whose rights could also be violated”.

The minors at the moment are underneath the safety of the federal government and investigations stay underneath approach.