Cult Members Want To Go to Greece
Associated Press/January 6, 1999
By Karin Laub
JERUSALEM--Members of an American doomsday cult awaiting deportation after allegedly plotting violent acts in Jerusalem want to go to Greece rather than return to the United States, their lawyer said today.
Eran Avital, a lawyer who represents three members of the Concerned Christians, said his clients also told him their leader, Monte Kim Miller, who dropped out of sight in the fall, was in London.
Avital said his clients preferred to go to Greece because other group members are already there and because they believed the United States would be destroyed soon.
Miller and several dozen followers have not been seen since selling their homes and belongings in the Denver area last fall. Miller told his followers that he will die in the streets of Jerusalem in December 1999 and be resurrected three days later.
Fourteen cult members, including six children, came to Israel in September and rented two homes in the Jerusalem suburbs of Mevasseret Zion and Moza. Israeli police watched the homes for several weeks and raided them Sunday, detaining the residents.
Israeli police have said the cult members planned to provoke bloodshed by attacking policemen in Jerusalem. A senior police source, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the cult members were planning violent acts in Jerusalem's walled Old City and that one possible location was the Temple Mount, site of Jewish-Arab tensions in the past.
Deportation orders were issued against 11 group members, including three women and six children. They are being held in a Jerusalem hostel under police guard, Avital said.
Three others were investigated by police on suspicion they plotted violent acts near Jerusalem holy sites in the belief that this would trigger a bloody Armageddon and hasten the second coming of Christ.
The three men have denied the allegations, telling an Israeli magistrate on Monday that they had no plans to hurt anyone. But today, after a police investigation, the judge ordered the three -identified as John Bayles of Denver, Terry Smith of Eagle, Colo., and Eric Malesic of Westminster, Colo. -to be deported, the Interior Ministry said.
Avital said his clients would not fight deportation even though they would have preferred to remain in Israel to await what they believe will be the return of Jesus Christ at the millennium.
To see more documents/articles regarding this group/organization/subject click here.
