By CATHERINE FIELD
PARIS - France has filed for the extradition of a New Zealand woman at the centre of a former religious sect which triggered nationwide controversy for alleged brainwashing of its members and violent abuse of their children.
Delwin Johns-Schmidt, aged 34, was arrested in Belfast at the request of French prosecutors who filed an arrest warrant with Interpol, accusing her of kidnapping and illegally detaining her 10-year-old daughter, Victoria.
The child, who was one of the sect's victims, was placed with her grandparents in Louveciennes, west of Paris, after the movement was broken up in 1993 and three of its leaders put on trial, including her father.
Johns-Schmidt had been given visiting rights and had just cleared the first hurdle towards gaining supervised custody of Victoria when she absconded with the child to Northern Ireland on July 14, sources at the prosecutors office in Versailles said.
She was arrested on July 28 and placed in custody, while Victoria was put in temporary foster care.
The sect, La Citadelle, made the headlines when its activities came to light in 1988, exposing heart-rending cases of brutality that fuelled public demands for a crackdown on fringe religious groups.
That mood, spurred by scandals involving the Church of Scientology, culminated in new laws this year that place sects under tight official scrutiny.
An ultra-hardline Protestant sect headed by a Romanian guru named Gheorghiu Dimitriscu-Mihaies, La Citadelle had more than 100 members in its heyday, drawn from the wealthy professional classes - surgeons, scientists, bankers, doctors, engineers and dentists.
They tithed their income to the sect and borrowed huge sums of money from banks, which was used to buy a mansion in a well-heeled Paris suburb and a former vicarage in Brittany.
Children of the sect were kept isolated from the world, deprived of sleep, ordered to pray for hours at a time and fast for one day a week with no food or water to protect them from Satan and purify their bodies.
They were denied all toys, which were considered instruments of the Devil, and were allowed only to read the Bible and play selected pieces of classical music on the violin.
Any deemed transgression was rewarded with a blow of the belt. Seven children were treated this way.
Johns-Schmidt's husband, Axel Schmidt, was sentenced to 18 months' jail in absentia in February 1995 for bodily harm and lack of care of minors in his charge.
Another sect leader, Esther Antoine, was given a three-year term as was Dimitriscu-Mihaies' wife, Delia Mihaies, who, like Schmidt, fled during the trial and was sentenced in absentia.
The sources said both Mihaies and Schmidt were still on the run.
Kiwi sect woman arrested in Northern Ireland
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