183 rescued from sect ranch in Texas
Texas officials investigating a potential child abuse case said on Saturday 183 children and women had been removed from a ranch that is home to a breakaway Mormon sect linked to jailed polygamist leader Warren Jeffs.
Texas Child Protective Services spokeswoman Marleigh Meisner said the 183 consisted of 137 children and 46 women, but she could not discuss why they were taken from the ranch or whether they had left voluntarily.
Only 18 members of the group had been placed in the legal custody of the state agency, she said by telephone.
Local media reports said sect leaders had earlier refused to let authorities search the compound, but local prosecutor Allison Palmer said the situation has been "defused".
"The residents have very strong feelings about their place of worship. But the authorities have managed to work through that with them in a peaceful manner it seems," Palmer said. He said police were still conducting a search of the premises.
Investigators were looking for a young woman whose complaint sparked the raid in the first place though Palmer said there was a chance that she might be among the scores who had been removed from the compound and had not yet been identified.
Texas authorities descended on the ranch this week in response to allegations that a 50-year-old man there had married and fathered a child with an underage girl.
An official at the sheriff's department in the nearby town on Eldorado said that police were working at the compound around the clock in shifts and that everything had been "smooth".
The compound is in a semi-arid area about 200 km northwest of San Antonio.
Buses and vans were seen on Friday driving some of the women and children from the ranch, located near the small western Texas town of Eldorado, and more were taken out overnight, Meisner said.
Local news reports said temporary shelters had been set up in churches and government buildings to house them.
The ranch is a compound for the renegade Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, a polygamist group led by Jeffs until last year.
In November, Jeffs was sentenced in a Utah court to 10 years to life in prison as an accomplice to rape for forcing a 14-year-old girl to marry her 19-year-old first cousin.
He is in jail in Arizona awaiting trial on similar charges for arranged marriages there.
Agencies
(China Daily 04/07/2008 page6)
