Members of the Lev Tahor sect detained after arrest for human trafficking
About 20 members of an ultra-Orthodox Jewish sect escaped detention in southern Mexico on Wednesday night after subduing guards at the facility.
They had been detained at the scene since their leader, Menachem Endel Alter, was arrested last Friday.
Those who escaped were held through Mexico’s National System for the Integral Development of the Family (DIF).
Members of the Lev Tahor sect, mostly women and young men dressed in long classical robes, subdued guards at a DIF immigration detention center. They climbed a guard who had been driven to the ground before boarding a truck waiting for them outside.
Police in the southern state of Chiapas, neither they, nor the National Guard, nor the immigration government pursued the vehicle that fled on its way to Honduras.
Lev Tahor’s supporters demanded the release of the members detained for nearly a week.
Although Lev Tahor members denounced the “violation of their freedom and devout rights,” Israel’s Foreign Ministry issued a statement Tuesday saying the Mexican raid on the sect compound “took place after Mexican police accumulated incriminating evidence opposing several members of the sect. “”suspected of drug trafficking, rape, etc.
These two members of Lev Tahor were arrested for human trafficking and serious sexual offences. The ministry also showed that several of those arrested were Israeli citizens.
Lev Tahor, which means “pure heart” in Hebrew, was founded in 1988 by Shlomo Helbrans, an Israeli.
It is a fundamentalist sect that practices arranged marriages and demands full blankets for women from the age of three.
Although his austerity won admirers, others ridiculed him as the “Jewish Taliban” for his reactionary beliefs. Estimated to be composed of two or three hundred members, Lev Tahor rejects the State of Israel.
Since its founding, Lev Tahor has faced accusations of abduction, child marriage and physical violence.
In June, two Lev Tahor executives in the United States were sentenced to 12 years by a federal court in the District of New York on charges of kidnapping and sex trafficking.
The organization has moved since its founding, moving between Israel, Canada, the United States, Guatemala, Mexico and parts of Europe.
The escape preceded riots where Lev Tahor members and their youths bombarded the guards with stones and garbage.
js/rc (AP, Reuters)