April 04, 2008	Friday	Rabi-ul-Awwal 26, 1429

NIKOLSKOYE (Russia), April 3: Russian authorities played a waiting game on Thursday with members of a doomsday sect in a remote village who have barricaded themselves into a cave to await the end of the world.

As negotiations continued with 11 members of the sect holed up in the cave complex since November, attention turned to their leader, Pavel Kuznetsov, who has warned of approaching Apocalypse but never actually joined his followers in the cave.

On Wednesday evening, the bearded leader was found beating himself over the head with a log in an apparent suicide attempt and was later hospitalised for a head injury, officials announced.

“It was an attempted suicide. Pyotr put his head on a tree stump and started hitting his head with a log. He is in hospital with a head wound,” the Penza region’s deputy governor, Oleg Melnichenko, was quoted on the website of NTV television as saying. At a press conference in the regional capital a senior prosecutor, Grigory Zhitenev, said that “there is a motive for suicide, including that the end of the world has not come,” Interfax reported.

Thirty-five sect members went into the cave in Nikolskoye, some 700 kilometres south-east of Moscow, last November, claiming that the end of the world would occur this May.

They have threatened to blow themselves up with cooking gas canisters if the authorities attempt force to make them come out.

Kuznetsov has been held in a psychiatric hospital for treatment but has been periodically released to help try to persuade fellow sect members to leave the cave, amid fears that it could collapse.

On Thursday morning, other members of the sect visited the cave to try to persuade those inside to end their vigil. A majority have been persuaded to leave in recent weeks.

Many of those who have left the cave continue to await the end of the world at Kuznetsov’s wooden cottage in the village.

The sect members adhere to an extremely simple lifestyle, believing among other things that bar codes on food products are a symbol of the devil.

Kuznetsov spoke to his followers in the cave on Wednesday, persuading a mother and her two children to come out.

“Pyotr said God had collapsed the cave and to go against God is a great sin,” Melnichenko said on Wednesday.

Officials have also brought in a priest specialising in apocalyptic literature to speak to the sect.—AFP