Europe & UK Cult News: 13–19 September 2026

By He Who Shan't Be Named

Published 20 Sept 2026

Updated 21 Sept 2026

Europe & UK Cult News
UK
Europe
France
Sweden
Romania
Serbia
Estonia
Italy
Rémy Daillet
Lighthouse
A Very British Cult
Ahmadi Religion of Peace and Light
AROPL
Alex Batty
modern slavery

Europe & UK Cult News: 13–19 September 2026 featured image — Court sketch of Rémy Daillet at the opening of his Paris trial, 15 September 2026

In France the Paris criminal court opened the trial of Rémy Daillet, the conspiracy organiser French outlets call a gourou (guru), and fourteen co-defendants over the 2021 abduction of eight-year-old Mia.

In the UK three members of the Lighthouse cult lost their appeal against harassment convictions for doorstepping BBC journalist Catrin Nye over A Very British Cult. York Crown Court jailed a Scarborough man for breaching a Slavery and Trafficking Risk Order, a civil ban meant to stop modern-slavery offending.

Swedish public radio and the news site Omni reported that the BBC is filming a documentary on the Ahmadi Religion of Peace and Light’s former base outside Hällefors, a town in central Sweden.

Also this week: Alex Batty spoke about a new job in Greater Manchester after years taken into an off-grid conspiracy life by his mother. An Italian mother in Sweden, Silvia Campagna, told Leggo her violent ex had entered what she calls a religious setta and that she had not seen their children for 115 days.

Romania’s Escape Truck taught teenagers to spot human trafficking. The Guardian reviewed The Liberation, Guy Nattiv’s cult-commune drama. Canal+ aired the thriller Gourou (Guru).

Beyond Europe, a New York Times Styles piece returned to Eternal Values, and a Genetic Literacy Project item cast AI apocalypse warnings in “doomsday cult” terms.

Rémy Daillet on trial in Paris

In France the Paris criminal court began hearing the case against Rémy Daillet and fourteen co-defendants on 15 September. The trial is listed through 9 October. Prosecutors tie the group to the April 2021 abduction of Mia, then eight, from her grandmother’s home in the Vosges, a forested county in eastern France, and to association of offenders linked to a terrorist enterprise, a French charge for helping prepare terrorist crime.

French reporting describes Daillet as a former local official for MoDem, a French centrist party, in Haute-Garonne, the county around Toulouse in south-west France, who later broadcast from Malaysia. La Dépêche du Midi, a regional daily covering that area, calls him a gourou (guru) who organised a closed far-right conspiracy network split into cells. Rudy Reichstadt, director of Conspiracy Watch, a French group that monitors conspiracy networks, told France Bleu:

« Il est passé de la parole aux actes. »

Show English translation

He had moved from words to deeds.

The group called the abduction Operation LIMA, a codename built from Lola, the mother’s first name, and Mia as an anagram. Cells used fake ASE cards, French child-protection worker documents, to stage so-called child “restitutions,” snatching children from guardians the group claimed were unsafe, as training for a wider coup scenario nicknamed Azur. The indictment also covers planned attacks on people the group treated as enemies. The Telegraph in London cast the same plot as a bid to overthrow the French government.

On the opening day the court screened propaganda videos from the network. French reports name Adrien B., known as Booga, as the civil-branch lead, with successive captains on the military side.

Mia was recovered five days later in a squat in Switzerland. Her mother is among the defendants. Mid-week the mother spent about five hours in the witness box, saying she had sought to save her daughter from an imagined pedophile network inside child protection. A co-defendant told the court he regretted posing as a social worker to take the child. Mia remains with her grandmother and refuses visits from her mother. The grandmother, Corinne Douay, was too distressed to attend. Daillet’s lawyer says his client will contest the case as fantasy piled on a “child restitution.”

Daillet is the only defendant held in custody. Released under judicial supervision in 2023, he was returned to Fleury-Mérogis prison in August. At the opening hearing his lawyer sought bail. The court refused, saying detention was the only way to keep him available for trial. Daillet told the court:

« Je vis d’eau fraîche et de pain dur, c’est difficile. »

Show English translation

I live on fresh water and hard bread, it is difficult.

Lighthouse men lose Catrin Nye appeal

From left to right: Kristofer Deichler, Jatinder Kamra, and Sukhraj Singh

In the UK three men linked to the Lighthouse cult lost their appeal against harassment convictions for twice attending the home of BBC journalist Catrin Nye, the BBC reported on 18 September. Nye presented the podcast and film A Very British Cult, which investigated Lighthouse.

Kristofer Deichler, Jatinder Kamra and Sukhraj Singh had each been given 200 hours’ unpaid work and restraining orders after visiting Nye’s home in August and September 2024. The appeal court upheld the convictions.

The judge said they had used a private investigator to find a private address, leafleted neighbours with material that went beyond media criticism, and returned after signalling they would be back. Each was ordered to pay a further £1,000.

Nye told the court she had installed CCTV and panic measures. The men cast the visits as citizen journalism. The court held that the conduct crossed into bullying.

Scarborough modern-slavery order breach

Robert Viv Chinchen, jailed after flouting a Slavery and Trafficking Risk Order

In the UK Robert Viv Chinchen, 37, was jailed for two years and eight months at York Crown Court on 15 September after pleading guilty to two counts of breaching a Slavery and Trafficking Risk Order. North Yorkshire Police said it was the first time an interim and full order of that kind had been used in the county. The order is a civil ban under the Modern Slavery Act 2015, meant to keep people who police say pose a slavery or trafficking risk away from named places and people.

In Scarborough, a town on England’s north-east coast, the ban covered 44 properties across Barrowcliff, Northstead and Woodlands, where police said Chinchen had caused “misery and fear.” Officers worked the estate with council and housing partners under a Clear Hold Build neighbourhood strategy. He admitted attending banned addresses on Elders Street and Queen Street in June and July. Inspector Craig Regan said the sentence warned others who “target, manipulate, intimidate, and exploit vulnerable people.”

BBC film on the Hällefors years of AROPL

In Sweden P4 Örebro, the local public-radio station for Örebro County in central Sweden, and Omni, a Swedish news aggregator, reported on 19 September that the BBC is preparing a documentary on the Ahmadi Religion of Peace and Light. The cult lived at a former hostel in Sävsjön, a village outside Hällefors in that county, before moving to Crewe in north-west England in 2021. BBC reporter Hayley Mortimer told Swedish radio the film would follow why the group moved from the Middle East to Germany, Sweden and then England.

Swedish police and migration authorities had already pushed the group out of Hällefors. Cheshire Police raided the Crewe headquarters in spring 2026 over alleged trafficking and sexual offences.

Freedom Times covered those April raids on Webb House and returned to the Crewe and Chester story in the 13 September weekly. Omni noted that people in the group are suspected of trafficking and sex crimes. No BBC transmission date was given.

Alex Batty’s new job

Alex Batty has been working at a waste management site for three months

In the UK Alex Batty, now 20, told the BBC on 17 September that work at a SUEZ waste site in Greater Manchester had restored a “sense of purpose.” Batty was taken to France as a child by his mother, who was steeped in conspiracy thinking, and lived off-grid for years before a courier found him in the Pyrenees, the mountain range on the France–Spain border, in December 2023.

BBC Three’s documentary Kidnapped by My Mum first aired on 13 May 2026 and is available on iPlayer.

A SUEZ manager, Daniel Carolan, contacted him after a BBC Breakfast interview in which Batty said he was among young people not in education, employment or training. Batty said the job supports his partner and baby. The Oldham Times carried the local confirmation.

Silvia Campagna’s custody appeal in Sweden

In Italy Leggo, a national daily, on 17 September published Silvia Campagna’s appeal from Sweden. Campagna moved from Italy via Finland into a small Swedish town with a man she met online. ReteNews24, citing Fanpage, names him as Simon. She says she denounced years of domestic and sexual violence, filed three formal complaints with Swedish authorities in 2025 and 2026, then lost custody of her eight-year-old and four-year-old. She has not seen them for 115 days and has written to Italian political leaders, including a letter to Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni.

Campagna says Simon’s family follows Laestadianism, a strict Lutheran revival movement found in parts of Scandinavia and Finland, and she herself calls that milieu a setta, the Italian word she uses for a cult. The children are with the father and the paternal grandfather. The custody fight has left her cut off from them.

Romania’s Escape Truck for teenagers

Escape Truck launch event with Romanian police and partners

In Romania the National Agency Against Trafficking in Persons (ANITP, the state anti-trafficking body) and World Vision Romania brought a Dutch Escape Truck prevention tour to teenagers and trainee police this month, ANITP and local papers reported. The mobile escape-room, developed by the Dutch RESHAPE foundation with Dutch police and justice backing, stages simulated recruitment into sexual and labour exploitation so participants learn to spot early signs.

The first run, 14–19 September, travelled through Cluj-Napoca, Brașov, Câmpina and Bucharest, cities across Romania from Transylvania to the capital. A second stage is listed for 5–11 October on a Bucharest–Pitești–Craiova–Timișoara route in the south and west.

Romania Insider put more than 1,000 teenagers in the programme. Ziarul Impact wrote of about 1,100 adolescents.

Delpierre on modern labour slavery in France

In France Alternatives Économiques, a left-leaning economics magazine, on 19 September published Naïri Nahapétian’s interview with sociologist Alizée Delpierre about her book Comme des esclaves (Like Slaves, La Découverte). Delpierre describes modern labour slavery as surexploitation: near-unlimited hours, little or no pay, and employer control of food, water, housing and hygiene, mostly of undocumented migrants.

She draws on case files from the Comité contre l’esclavage moderne (Committee Against Modern Slavery), a French anti-slavery NGO, spanning three decades, plus interviews with victims and exploiters and labour and criminal hearings.

The Liberation and the cult-commune drama

In the UK The Guardian on 16 September reviewed The Liberation, Guy Nattiv’s drama from the Toronto International Film Festival. Carrie Coon plays Rita, a New Jersey woman who leaves her family for an all-female cult commune in the 1980s, takes the name Naia, and follows Lily James’s Ricki. Benjamin Lee calls it a thoughtful slow-burn against cheap cult horror. Festival coverage from Telluride praised Coon’s performance and the film’s personal grip.

In a Screen Daily feature from Toronto, Nattiv said the story is loosely drawn from his grandmother, a Holocaust survivor who transferred reparations into what became a cult, vanished to a woodland compound on the US east coast, and never came back. He later filmed ex-members and called the picture a love letter that closes an open wound. Bleecker Street, the US distributor, plans a limited November release and a wider opening in January 2027.

Canal+ airs Gourou

In France Canal+, a major pay-TV channel, aired Yann Gozlan’s thriller Gourou (Guru) on Friday 18 September at 21:10 French time (CEST). Pierre Niney, who also produced, plays Matthieu Vasseur, “Coach Matt,” a personal-development coach whose catharsis sessions for followers unsettle the authorities as a French Senate commission and a bill to regulate the coaching trade close in. Marion Barbeau co-stars. L’Obs TéléObs covered the broadcast as a thriller on the dark side of success.

The film ran 1 hour 59 minutes in theatrical release from 28 January 2026 and streams on Canal+ / myCANAL. A STUDIOCANAL France trailer is on YouTube.

Canal+ / myCANAL, Friday 18 September 2026, 21:10 French time (CEST, UTC+2). A daytime Canal+ slot follows on Wednesday 23 September at 14:42 CEST.

Giant Vučić portrait at a Serbian police meeting

Police leadership meeting under a giant portrait of Aleksandar Vučić

In Serbia Serbian Times on 19 September reported a police leadership meeting under a giant portrait of President Aleksandar Vučić after police director Dragan Vasiljević visited criminal-police units. The outlet likened the scene to North Korea and framed it as a kult vođe, a leader cult.

EKRE called a sekt in Estonian alt-media

In Estonia Telegram.ee’s Facebook-live show notes for 17 September, posted 18 September, asked how EKRE, the Estonian Conservative People’s Party, a hard-right party long led by the Helme family, became a sekt (cult) and whether the Helmes built it as a sektiklubi (cult club). Earlier Estonian commentary has used sektilaadne for EKRE’s inner culture.

Beyond Europe

Eternal Values in a New York Times Styles wedding

Hoyt Richards and Donna Flagg were married on Jetties Beach in Nantucket, Mass., on Sept. 4.

In the United States Tammy LaGorce’s New York Times Styles piece on 18 September told how supermodel Hoyt Richards vanished from Donna Flagg’s life in 1998 after indoctrination into Eternal Values, the doomsday cult led by Frederick von Mierers. The couple married on Jetties Beach in Nantucket, an island off Massachusetts, on 4 September.

Richards describes a leader who forbade outside attachments. Flagg only later understood the cult as the reason he disappeared. Freedom Times covered the June premiere of HBO’s Bring Me the Beauties: A Model Cult.

Andreessen and the “doomsday cult” AI framing

In the United States the Genetic Literacy Project on 17 September recirculated Marc Andreessen’s 2023 essay against AI apocalypse warnings, under a headline that casts end-of-the-world claims as a “doomsday cult.” The essay itself is three years old: Hayden Field’s CNBC report of 6 June 2023, “A.I. doomers are a ‘cult’ — here’s the real threat, according to Marc Andreessen”, covered it when it first appeared and quoted his line that AI “doesn’t want to kill you, because it’s not alive.”