Cult’s Suicide Threats Rattle Ukraine : Religion: Mysterious group promises mass deaths this Sunday. Authorities are detaining the members, called ‘zombies.’

Just before the militiamen lifted Alla Belova by her arms and legs to throw her into a patrol wagon, the 15-year-old stared vacantly past her own mother.

“She didn’t recognize me,” said Olga, the mother. Her daughter had disappeared from her Moscow home last January to join the Great White Brotherhood, a religious cult threatening to commit mass suicide in Kiev this Sunday.

Now Alla has been taken by the militia to a dreary cinder-block fortress on the outskirts of the Ukrainian capital, where she shares a barracks-like dormitory with some of the other 150 cult members detained by authorities since the cult began arriving in the city weeks ago.

The cultists shun questions from doctors, officials and journalists, answering all with shaking fists and chants of, “I curse you in the name of Maria Devi Christos,” the group’s self-styled messiah.

Forbidden by their faith from carrying identification, the cultists respond with nonsense when asked their names or birth dates.

“I am 87,000 years old,” said one boy, whose blank eyes explain the popular local name for the cultists, “zombies.”

The “zombies’ Sabbath,” as Kiev newspapers have labeled the apocalyptic event the cult is promising for Sunday, has become the most talked-about event in the city, inspiring jokes on the streets and alarm in government offices.

“They seem to be in a hypnotic trance, so we’re obviously concerned that they could be capable of anything,” said Oleksandr Zarubitsky, chief public relations officer for Kiev’s Interior Department.

He insisted that detaining the members has nothing to do with Soviet-style religious repression.

“We are just trying to prevent tragedies,” he said.

No one can be certain that the cult members actually will commit suicide. But 30 young people have already been hospitalized since they began refusing food and water, a sign that the sect takes self-destruction seriously.

Kiev authorities have begun compiling a photo album of the 500 members who have been detained since late October, to help families identify the members. Dozens of parents, mostly from Russia, have spent the last week huddled in forlorn groups on Kiev’s St. Sophia’s Square, exchanging stories and support.

White-robed Christos, the cult’s “living god,” whose heralded crucifixion Wednesday is to mark the beginning of the end for cult followers, has become a familiar figure from posters plastered on buildings from Moldova to Moscow.

But experts on the cult say its real leader is Yuri Kryvonohov, a fugitive who dabbled in hypnosis and extrasensory perception until 1991, when he met a Kiev University journalism student named Maria Tsvihun and transformed her into Maria Devi Christos.

How Kryvonohov, who is wanted by Interpol on various charges, including embezzlement, exerts his influence over the cult’s followers remains a mystery. But there is little doubt that Kryvonohov, who calls himself “the eternal prophet, John Swami,” writes the amalgam of prophecy, political ravings and instructions in civil disobedience that constitute the Great White Brotherhood’s theology.

Kryvonohov’s pointedly anti-Ukrainian tracts, reportedly printed in St. Petersburg, have sparked theories of Moscow-inspired conspiracies aimed at provoking civil disorder in Ukraine. But his arbitrary pronouncements have mostly inspired jokes, especially about the changing schedule for the apocalypse.

Originally planned for last year, Judgment Day was later deferred for unexplained reasons until Nov. 24. Last week the date was moved up to Sunday, apparently in response to the militia’s crackdown.