A US court last night (Wednesday) convicted Nachman Halbers and Meir Rosner, two members of the ultra-Orthodox sect, and imposed heavy sentences on them, including the possibility of life in prison.
The images that emerge from the evidence are particularly harsh and depict a complex extremist organization with an international presence designed to kidnap minors from their parents, marry them off to adult cult members and sexually exploit them.
To do so, the defendants used "disguises, disposable phones, fake travel documents and encrypted applications," according to a ruling released through the Southern District Attorney's Office of New York, led by Damian Williams.
"The defendants, leaders of an extremist Jewish sect called Pure Heart, drafted a plan to abduct a 14-year-old girl and a 12-year-old boy from their mother in Woodridge, New York in 2017," the indictment said.
According to the prosecution, the abducted minors were then smuggled to the U.S. border to Mexico, where they reunited the minors with their "husbands" to allow those "husbands" to continue their illegal sexual relationship.
In recent years and before their arrest, members of the sect have tried to obtain political asylum in a number of places including the Islamic Republic of Iran.
The prosecution describes the 39-year-old Halbers as the cult leader and the 45-year-old Rosner as his deputy, both U.S. citizens convicted of all four counts of sexual assault, conspiracy to commit sexual offenses, international abduction and forgery.
It now remains for the judge to determine the actual prison term but according to the offenses attributed to them are expected to last two decades in a federal prison.