The Jewish sect, Lev Tahor, has accused Guatemala authorities of non secular persecution.
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 have been being held.
Officers mentioned 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.
Among the youngsters have been discovered on Sunday, whereas others have been recovered early on Monday, based on 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 “have been allegedly being abused by a member of the Lev Tahor sect”, mentioned Minister of the Inside Francisco Jimenez.
Nancy Paiz, a prosecutor at Guatemala’s Prosecutor’s Workplace In opposition to Human Trafficking, mentioned at a information convention : “Based mostly on the statements of the complainants, the proof obtained, and the medical examinations, it was doable to determine that there are types of human trafficking towards these minors, corresponding to pressured marriage, abuse and associated crimes.”
About 100 of the youngsters’s kin who belong to the sect gathered on Sunday outdoors a care centre in Guatemala Metropolis, the place the youngsters have 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 youngsters and adolescents sheltered there”, an announcement from the Legal professional Normal’s Workplace mentioned.
“We wish them to let the youngsters out of right here,” Uriel Goldman, a consultant of the households, advised the AFP outdoors the centre earlier than the tried recapture of the minors.
These outdoors the shelter tried to stop the authorities from bringing again the minors, resulting in some scuffles with police, based on 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 mentioned, 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 non secular persecution.
“The authorities… inform lies with false accusations,” Goldman mentioned.
The Lev Tahor group, based in 1988 in Israel, practise an austere type of Judaism with interpretation of Jewish legislation that features lengthy prayer classes 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 kids and adolescents from a Lev Tahor camp, whose members have been arrested on suspicions of taking part in abuses towards minors.
The Jewish Group of Guatemala in an announcement mentioned the sect was overseas to its organisation and expressed its help for Guatemalan authorities in finishing up the mandatory investigations “to guard the lives and integrity of minors and different susceptible 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 beneath the safety of the federal government and investigations stay beneath method.
