The baby at the heart of an investigation into an alleged Russian cult leader in Argentina

Doctors in Argentina were already on high alert when a pregnant Russian woman showed up at the hospital. The 22-year-old looked nervous and malnourished, and her companions didn’t let her speak, according to police reports and Argentina’s prosecutor.

Doctors in Argentina were already on high alert when a pregnant Russian woman showed up at the hospital on March 21 with two other women to give birth. Hospital staff in the Patagonian city of Bariloche had seen them before – four days earlier, they struggled to answer questions about where they lived and how they were related. The 22-year-old mother-to-be looked nervous and malnourished, and her companions didn’t let her speak, according to police reports and Argentina’s prosecutor. The women accompanying her implored doctors to document the baby’s last name as Rudnev – the name of a notorious alleged cult leader opera­ting in the country – whom they insisted was the father, according to a prosecutor’s report. A week later, Argentine police located Konstantin Rudnev at one of the city’s airports and arrested him – part of a wave of arrests that day of over a dozen Russian nationals believed to be associated with his group. The two women accompanying the expectant mother to the hospital were also arrested in a raid of their shared home. According to Argentina prosecutor Fernando Arrigo, the pregnant woman may have been a victim of Rudnev’s Ashram Shambala, an organization described by Russian authorities as a cult. Neither Rudnev nor his associates have been charged with a crime yet in Argentina, where criminal probes start with arrest and investigation before formal allegations. Arrigo’s office says it is examining the possibility that the mother and her infant were coerced into a scheme for Rudnev to obtain Argentine citizenship by having a child born in the country. His office is officially investigating 21 Russian nationals in the country who are accused of “being part of a criminal organization that, for the purposes of sex trafficking and slavery, recruited a 22-year-old woman brought from Russia.”