Sergey Torop. Photo: Facebook

A court in the city of Novosibirsk, in western Siberia, has handed down a 12-year prison sentence to a Russian cult leader who claimed to be the reincarnation of Jesus, state-owned news agency RIA Novosti reported on Monday.

Sergey Torop, known to his followers as Vissarion, founded the Church of the Last Testament religious community in 1991, which attracted several thousand followers living in remote locations in the south of the Siberian Krasnoyarsk region.

“It’s all very complicated. But to keep things simple, yes, I am Jesus Christ,” Torop, a former locksmith and traffic officer, said in an interview with The Guardian in 2002.

Torop and his associates were arrested 18 years later, in September 2020, and accused of creating a religious community that violated the rights of its members and caused them bodily harm.

Two other community leaders — Vladimir Vedernikov and Vadim Redkin — were given a 12-year and an 11-year sentence respectively, state-owned news agency TASS reported. The community was liquidated via a court order in 2022.

According to the prosecution, the trio had embezzled the community members’ money for nearly 30 years, using their followers as free labour and causing them physical and psychological harm.

Sixteen people suffered “moral harm” and seven suffered physical harm as a result of the trio’s actions from 1991 to 2020, TASS wrote. The court awarded the claimants over 45 million rubles (€490,000) in damages.