Moment police raid twisted ritual where women 'in trances' bury themselves alive
Two young women were found 'buried alive' by police who raided a bizarre shamanic ritual where worshippers were gathered around a fire. The pair with their heads wrapped like mummies had to be dug out of the graves in a forest in the Leningrad region of Russia.
Both were alive after their ordeals with one having difficulty standing up when she was dug out while police also found 13 more worshippers who were waiting to be buried after digging their own graves. The self-styled shaman named Timur and his female assistant Yekaterina Koroleva were both detained on suspicion of running a sinister cult in the woodland spot where the people had surrounded a fire.
First, the shaman was ordered to dig out the two women from their 20-inch deep graves. Koroleva - organiser of the ritual - denied that the participants had paid almost £80 to die in the graves, and claimed their heads were not completely buried, allowing them to breathe.
'The essence of the ritual is essentially a kind of reset,' she said. 'It's a psychological trance ceremony where a person undergoes a complete reboot, a full cleansing.
'If someone has gone through certain life events, or wants to be completely reborn, to fully change their life — they opt for this extreme form of burial.'
Reports said participants were wrapped in rags and buried alive as part of a supposed rebirth or symbolic encounter with Hel, the Norse goddess of death.
Law enforcement were deciding how to proceed against the detained pair. They could face up to seven years in jail, reported Novye Izvestia news outlet. A shaman is a person believed to have access to, and influence in, the world of spirits, typically through rituals, visions, and healing practices.
Meanwhile, a Russian cult leader who claimed he would rape his female followers was detained in Argentina, in April. Konstantin Rudnev, already convicted of sexual abuse in Russia, was arrested in the city of Bariloche, on charges of human trafficking.
Local media reports that he was stopped along with 13 others. Video footage shows him being arrested, with the police also detaining a number of women.
They can be seen being placed in handcuffs and forcibly taken away. Rudnev was sentenced to 11 years in prison in Siberia in August 2013, after being accused of raping his female followers. The leader of his own sect, Ashram Shambala, founded in the late 1980s in Novosibirsk, he called himself the "Great Shaman Shri Dzhnan Avatar Muni."
He amassed about 20,000 fanatical followers all over the country, with branches in various parts of the former Soviet Union. He reportedly claimed to be a god from the star Sirius, an alien with mystical powers, and led orgies, amid a mix of yoga and esotericism.
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