Greek police on alert over doomsday cult members

Reuters/February 11, 1999

ATHENS, Feb 11 (Reuters) - Greek police are monitoring the movements of several people believed to be members of an American doomsday cult who were deported from Israel last month, police sources said on Thursday.

They said Israeli authorities had tipped them off that some of the 14 members of Concerned Christians, who were expelled from Israel in January, were in Athens.

Police located them at an apartment building near the coastal resort of Rafina and put them under surveillance, they said.

Asked to comment on the cult's presence in Greece, government spokesman Dimitris Reppas said that as long as they committed no crimes there was no reason to bother them.

``We do not prosecute people's religion in Greece,'' he told reporters.

Israel arrested and deported the 14 cult members, who included six children, on the grounds that they were plotting violence and mass suicide to mark the millennium. They were part of a group of 60 cult members who abandoned their homes and jobs in Denver, Colorado, months earlier and went missing.

Their leader, Monte Kim Miller, has prophesied that he will die in Jerusalem in 1999 and be resurrected three days later.

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