A court imposed Panama's maximum sentence of 50 years in prison Friday on seven members of a cult who killed a woman and six children in a religious rite in a remote part of the Central American nation.
FILE - An accordion sits on a bench inside a New Light of God temple in El Terron, Panama, Jan. 17, 2020, where a woman and six children were killed by cult members days earlier. A court on Friday, Dec. 3, 2021, imposed Panama's maximum sentence of 50 years in prison on seven members of the cult who killed the woman and six children in a religious rite in the Ngabe Bugle hamlet on Panama's Caribbean coast.
The cult had operated for about three years in the Ngabe Bugle hamlet of El Terron on Panama's Caribbean coast, but villagers said it had changed after one member had a vision telling the lay preachers they had been “annointed” to exterminate unbelievers. One of the 14 people rescued from the church the next day, Dina Blanco, said she had gone with her 9-year-old daughter, who had epilepsy, her 15-year-old son and her father.“I felt something hit my head, and then I don’t what happened to me," she told The Associated Press last year. “I dropped to my knees.”
The dead included Blanco's daughter, her pregnant neighbor and five of the woman's children. Their bodies were slung into hammocks and dumped in a freshly dug common grave in the village cemetery.
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