FBI puts Mormon leader on most wanted list

BREAKAWAY Mormon leader Warren Jeffs has been added to the FBI’s list of “Ten Most Wanted Fugitives,” a move that caps law enforcement’s dramatic change of approach toward the polygamous group in recent years.

Small polygamous groups have existed in the southwestern US under the watchful yet fairly benign eye of authorities ever since a sect known as the Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints (FLDS) separated itself from mainstream Mormonism in 1890.

That year, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints banned “plural marriages,” a move declared to be based on a “revelation” from God. The decision was also required for Utah to become a state.

The group’s belief that men need more than one wife to reach heaven, which FLDS defenders argue is a matter of religious freedom and pluralism in the United States, is not the main catalyst for the tougher stance. Rather, it’s the impact that the group’s practices, law enforcement officials say, are having on the most vulnerable within the sect, particularly children and women.

When the FLDS under Mr Jeffs (and his father before him) grew to some 10,000 followers in several southwestern communities with estimated assets of $110 million; then it became clear that government officials, school authorities, and police in those communities had become intertwined with the sect; when ex-members increasingly reported child and sexual abuse charges (mainly involving underage girls forced to marry older men); and when the sect began to use secluded compounds, state and federal authorities started to crack down more vigorously.

Several models from the 1990s concern them, according to experts who track such groups: “Freemen” holing themselves up — armed and with children present — for months in 1996 at an isolated Montana ranch; antigovernment radicals shooting it out with federal agents at Ruby Ridge, Idaho in 1992; and scores of people, including many children, killed during a gunfight and conflagration at the Branch Davidian compound near Waco, Texas.

Specifically, Jeffs is charged in Utah and Arizona with sexual assault of underage girls and with arranging “spiritual” marriages for girls and older men. At weekend press conferences in Salt Lake City and Phoenix, FBI and state officials said Jeffs “is considered armed and dangerous and may be travelling with armed bodyguards.” In the past, he has talked in apocalyptic terms about a violent end to the world, according to former members.

Yesterday, residents were seen leaving the town of Colorado City, as police and prosecutors arrived in the polygamist community.