Electronic Telegraph International News Thursday 20 March 1997 Issue 664 Satan cult leaders hunted after teenagers found hanged By Alan Philps in Moscow and Dmitry Belyakov in Tyumen --------------- RUSSIAN police are searching for the ringleaders of a Satanic cult in western Siberia, after a series of deaths among young devotees. The cult was concentrated near the oil city of Tyumen, 1,400 miles east of Moscow, where five young people were found hanged. The deaths were originally thought to be suicides. But pressure from the parents and the discovery of cabalistic jottings suggest the youths were involved in a seven-stage initiation ceremony that culminated in ritual suffocation. The deaths occurred last year, but the authorities have only now begun to act on evidence that the youths were suffocated before being hung up by leather belts to simulate suicide. The first death was in April, when Denis Abramov, 19, was found hanged in his room at home. In May it was the turn of Dima Bronnikov, 17, and in July, Stas Buslov was found hanged from a tree. Three days later his friend Sergei Sidorov, 18, died in the same manner at home, as did Tanya Stankeyeva, 22, in October. The first death occurred in the village of Roshchino, the other four in Antipovo, both villages on the edge of Tyumen. All the victims used to meet in a basement, which was equipped with a kind of Satanic altar and had walls painted with diabolical signs and cryptic symbols. The police, who have no experience of weird cults and want to keep the crime figures down, originally showed no interest in the deaths. But police captain Sergei Denisov said: "We have now launched an investigation into criminal activity by a Satanist sect. We are looking for the cult leader." Boris Buslov, the father of Stas, has spent months going through diaries left by his son. "I was looking for a suicide note or a hint of why he had hanged himself. When I started to read and decode his diaries it became clear that his death was the result of a cruel cult ritual - or perhaps it was that he knew who killed Dima Bronnikov and they could not let him escape." One of the notes left behind by Stas shows him predicting his own death: a boy is shown hanging from a tree. His father believes that four codenames - Gabriel, Sashiel, Anael and Mikhael - refer to the three dead boys and a fourth member, who has fled the town for fear of death. The mother of Sergei Sidorov said her son admitted to her shortly before his death that he was involved in a cult. "Mama, I'm a Satanist. I know it is bad, but I cannot escape. They are terribly strong." Thanks to contacts in the security services, Mr Buslov discovered that 36 young people aged from 12 to 22 have hanged themselves in Tyumen province (population 700,000) in the past year. While there is no known connection to any cult, the high number of deaths has shaken the whole of western Siberia. A spokesman for the provincial prosecutor's office said: "We may be dealing with a serial killing, though it is not clear if this is murder or incitement to suicide." The leader of the cult is said to be a man in his 40s, who, helped by two younger acolytes, exerted enormous influence on naive provincial children. But, thanks to the tardiness of the police, there seems little chance of catching those responsible. The Orthodox Church originally refused to give the hanged youths a Christian burial, as it regards suicide as a mortal sin. But it has now decided that they are murder victims and will give them a proper burial once the investigations are completed. Churchmen blame the authorities for allowing a post-communist boom in cults - from foreign imports such as the Moonies to home-grown sects such as the Holy Virgin Centre and the White Brotherhood, whose supporters once flocked to the centre of Kiev to await the end of the world. "We must all share the blame for this," said Archbishop Dmitry of Siberia, speaking in the town of Tobolsk. He criticised President Yeltsin for sending his grandson to school in England. "Don't the politicians understand that, when their children come back to Russia, they also share the risk of being involved in an evil sect like the one killing children in Tyumen?" The archbishop had his own explanation for the Satanic cult: Lenin's mummified corpse, which is still housed in a mausoleum on Red Square in Moscow, was brought to Tyumen for safety during the war in 1942. "The seeds of Satanism were left behind after the body returned to Moscow," he said.
