Two dozen members of an ultra-Orthodox Jewish sect excessively subdued the guards and escaped from a shelter in southern Mexico where they had been detained since the arrest of one of their leaders last Friday on crimes of organized crime and human trafficking.
Composed mostly of young men dressed in long, loose robes, members of the Lev Tahor sect emerged from the compound on Wednesday night, climbing a guard from a personal security company who had fallen to the ground. The federal government’s shelter for youth and families in Huixtla houses migrants detained through immigration officials.
They boarded a truck waiting outside and headed to Mexico’s border with Guatemala. Local police, the National Guard and Mexico’s immigration firm said they had not been prosecuted.
On Friday, the government arrested Menachem Endel Alter of Jerusalem and Moshe Yosef Rosner of New York, leaders of the Lev Tahor sect, on charges of organized crime and human trafficking in Tapachula, near the Guatemalan border.
Lev Tahor has had legal elsewhere.
Last November, two leaders of the organization were convicted of kidnapping and child sexual exploitation crimes in New York. They allegedly kidnapped two young men from their mother to bring back a 14-year-old woman to an illegal sex rendezvous with an adult man.
The sect will have members in Canada, the United States, Mexico, Guatemala and Israel.
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