The week of 20–26 July carried cult and high-control stories across Europe and the UK: South Korean authorities’ detention of Shincheonji founder Lee Man-hee drew Dutch and Czech coverage as recruiters were flagged in Prague, Tour de France coverage revived the search for Tadej Pogačar’s cousin after her mother was linked to the Lana Praner circle in the Canary Islands, Police Scotland said further investigation is ongoing into Mohamed Al Fayed abuse allegations at Balnagown Estate, Spanish and US outlets revisited the Andic family case in Barcelona after La Vanguardia scrutinised “extreme experience” therapies linked to therapist María Julia Lüderwaldt, a modelling scout linked to Jeffrey Epstein was found dead near Paris, Dutch magazine LINDA. published a survivor account of sexual abuse inside a cult, Czech writers mapped the Tartaria conspiracy scene, and BBC Somerset revisited the Victorian Agapemonite cult at Spaxton. Summaries draw on monitored European and UK outlets. Full source links follow.

Shincheonji founder detained as Prague mayor warns on street recruitment

Reformatorisch Dagblad reported that South Korean authorities took Shincheonji founder Lee Man-hee, 94, into provisional custody. Lee denies the allegations. Shincheonji Church of Jesus, the Temple of the Tabernacle of the Testimony, which he founded in 1984, presents him as the New Testament “Promised Pastor.” Mainstream Christian churches treat the movement as a cult, which Shincheonji denies. The Dutch paper noted German Catholic cult specialist Dr Johannes Lorenz’s 2023 warning that Shincheonji was then among the fastest-growing communities in Germany, and that the movement is also active in the Netherlands.

In Prague, Refresher reported that mayor Jan Čižinský warned residents after young women recruiting for Shincheonji (Czech: Sinčchondži) appeared around Strossmayerovo náměstí and elsewhere in Prague 7 and Prague 1. Recruiters offer Korean-language courses, K-pop, food, or Bible study, or invent cover stories such as seeking book respondents or film extras. Čižinský said the aim is to attach young women to the group, cut them off from their surroundings, fill their lives with work for the movement, and take money from them. A registered address was given on Osadní street in Prague 7, with a possible new branch in Břevnov.

Pogačar family still searching for cousin taken into a Canary Islands cult

As Tadej Pogačar closed in on a fifth Tour de France title, L’Indépendant returned to the family’s unresolved search for his young cousin Julija, missing since 3 November 2021. Citing Telecinco, the French paper said her mother, Melisa Smrekar, divorced Peter Pogačar, then joined a cult in the Canary Islands during the Covid period and took Julija without telling him.

Telecinco reports that Peter links Melisa’s break with the family to the Slovenian religious-spiritual circle around Lana Praner, a conspiracy-minded group also referred to as Academia Lana Praner / Lana Praner z Gospodi (“Lana Praner and the Lords”). He says it mixes New Age-style teaching with anti-vaccine and anti-5G claims and presses followers toward isolation. Melisa had taken Julija to Praner sessions before the disappearance, he says. Praner left Slovenia in 2020 amid investigations her followers dispute.

L’Indépendant published Praner’s reply:

Il n’existe aucune décision judiciaire, administrative ou policière ayant établi que Julija Pogačar aurait été enlevée par une secte ou qu’une quelconque secte serait liée à son départ.

Dans ses lettres, Melisa Smrekar déclare expressément que Lana Praner n’a aucun lien avec son départ et présente publiquement ses excuses à Lana Praner ainsi qu’à sa famille pour toutes les souffrances injustement subies en raison de cette situation.

Despite a Europol missing-person notice, the family has had little to go on beyond roughly a dozen letters Melisa is said to have sent to Slovenia from Spain. On the eve of the 2022 Tour start, Tadej Pogačar posted an Instagram story asking for help finding her. On Julija’s fifteenth birthday this week, her father published a further appeal.

Police Scotland reopens Al Fayed Balnagown inquiry after new witness

The Scotsman and BBC News reported that Police Scotland says “further investigation is ongoing” into sexual assault allegations against the late Mohamed Al Fayed, the former Harrods owner who died in August 2023. Some alleged assaults are linked to his Balnagown Estate in Easter Ross, which he bought in 1972. In 2024 the force said it had completed inquiries into a non-recent sexual assault report at the estate. On Sunday a spokesperson said further investigation was under way and that it would be inappropriate to comment further.

The Scottish Mail on Sunday reported that the inquiry linked to Sophia Stone, now 58, could not originally progress for lack of corroboration. Stone, who joined Harrods at 19 and worked as Al Fayed’s personal assistant, reported to Police Scotland in 2021. Her husband has previously told the BBC she was groomed, sexually assaulted, and almost raped, with harassment continuing in offices and on private aircraft. A new witness is now understood to have backed her account.

The Scotsman noted more than 400 allegations of sexual misconduct against Al Fayed between 1977 and 2014, and that the Metropolitan Police is investigating cases involving 155 victims. Harrods has said it was “utterly appalled” by the allegations. Its new owners run a compensation scheme for ex-employees who say they were attacked.

Barcelona Andic case puts “extreme experience” therapies under scrutiny

La Vanguardia this week examined so-called “extreme experience” therapies after fresh Mossos d’Esquadra testimony in the Andic case. In December 2024 Mango founder Isak Andic fell more than 300 feet from a Collbató trail in Montserrat while walking with his eldest son, Jonathan, then the firm’s vice-president, later arrested as a suspect and denying the allegations. Father and son had been in conflict, including over money, and were seeing María Julia Lüderwaldt, an Ecuadorian-German psychotherapist who is not registered with any psychology college. El País has described her as a discreet fixture among Barcelona’s elite families. A former patient cast her methods as “sectarian.”

A UK national who collaborated with Lüderwaldt told Mossos that the therapist instructed Jonathan to put himself and his father into an “extreme situation”, standing “at the edge of a cliff”, to enact the psychoanalytic “death of the father” and loosen his emotional dependence on Isak. The collaborator says she chose the Camí de les Feixades trail and walked it with Jonathan a week before the fatal fall on the same path, undercutting his earlier claim that friends had pointed him there. After news of the death she asked Lüderwaldt what had happened. The therapist replied, the papers say: “Maybe it’s better if I don’t know, otherwise I might be next.” Lüderwaldt has not been charged.

La Vanguardia places those methods among practices close to Spain’s definition of pseudotherapies: the health ministry’s 2019 plan covers health-claimed services without scientific support for efficacy and safety, and the paper says extreme-experience therapies are not specifically recognised in Spain. It notes that US outdoor and adventure experiential approaches lack solid empirical backing, and that a 2025 review in Clinical Psychology & Psychotherapy found positive evidence “heterogeneous” and short of large rigorous trials. The Col·legi Oficial de Psicologia de Catalunya is investigating Lüderwaldt for unlicensed practice and possible professional intrusion or malpractice.

Modelling scout linked to Epstein found dead near Paris

BBC News reported that modelling scout Daniel Siad, 69, was found dead on Monday at his home in Colombes, a north-west Paris suburb. The Nanterre prosecutor’s office opened an inquiry into the cause of death and ordered a post-mortem.

Siad’s name appears thousands of times in US government Epstein files. He denied knowing the threat Epstein posed. Paris prosecutors said a February investigation into organised human trafficking and conspiracy continues “to identify all individuals potentially involved” despite the end of criminal proceedings against Siad, and that special techniques including phone surveillance had not produced enough evidence to arrest him. His lawyer said he had never been prosecuted and that he died innocent.

In a previous BBC account, survivor “Anya” said Siad introduced her to Epstein and described him as “essentially a professional trafficker.”

Dutch survivor describes sexual abuse inside a cult

Dutch women’s magazine LINDA. published an interview with Vicky Bergman, 56, one of six women describing experiences in dubious religious and spiritual groups in the Netherlands. LINDA. does not name the organisations Bergman joined.

She says that from her twenties to her thirties she moved through several Christian faith movements after a traumatic youth and street recruitment promising a loving God: music, Bible study, and shared travel at first, then strict belonging rules. Jewellery and make-up were banned. Questions or disobedience were treated as demonic possession requiring “deliverance”: hours of prayer and, once, a three-week fast to break free of “earthly things.”

She says she was seriously sexually abused after a preacher claimed she was possessed by the demon Jezebel and that his seed would purify her, a claim she still believed while under the group’s influence. After fleeing with her brother’s help to a women’s shelter, a police officer told her it “sounded like a cult.” Only years of therapy, she said, showed how leaders had been driven by sex and power rather than God’s will.

Czech coverage of the Tartaria conspiracy cult scene

On Seznam’s Médium blogging platform, an independent writer under the account České sekty a sekty v ČR published an essay examining the Slovak site tartaria.sk and engineer Vladimír Laubert (“Ladomír”). It argues the portal is a main channel into Slovakia and Czechia for radical, pro-Russian, racist teaching known as inglism (ynglism). Laubert publishes via the contested imprint Torden and lectures on a mystical Slavic script called bukvice. The essay says promoters present themselves as recovering forgotten ancestral history that science hides, while openly following Russia’s Alexander Kinevich, styled by devotees as Pater Day (“divine father”), including a 2008 pilgrimage to Omsk, cast in their mythology as sacred Asgard, for blessing and an initiation “renaming” rite. The mix also includes UFO lore: a claimed 1948 KGB interrogation of an alien “Ra” at Kapustin Yar, with a prophecy of planetary transformation around 2028.

Tartaria (or the Tartarian Empire) is the wider conspiracy behind that branding: a pseudohistorical claim that a lost, advanced civilisation once spanned much of Eurasia, drawing on the old geographic label Tartary for Central Asia and Siberia, and that official history erased it. Online versions invent “mud floods” and reassign grand old buildings to Tartarians. Russian nationalist strands treat Tartaria as a suppressed true Russia. The author warns that in the Czech-Slovak scene the cosmology ranks human races by different extraterrestrial origins and unequal “spiritual value,” turning esoterica into a defence of segregation and extreme nationalism, and that such cults can erode trust in democratic institutions even where Russian authorities curb them at home.

Victorian Agapemonites cult remembered in Spaxton

BBC Radio Somerset and the West of England desk revisited the Agapemonites, a Victorian sex cult based at a chapel in Spaxton near Bridgwater, now an Airbnb. Author Stuart Flinders (A Very British Cult) said members were told they could never leave, and that many later took their own lives.

Leader Henry James Prince, a former Church of England priest who claimed to be the Holy Spirit, took followers’ fortunes and staged sexual ceremonies in which, Flinders said, his wife watched him impregnate other women. After Prince’s death in 1899, successor John Hugh Smyth-Piggott claimed to be Christ returned. The group dwindled after his death in 1927.

Beyond Europe

These items were reported on outlets we monitor. The events themselves sit outside the UK and EU.

Ethiopia police arrest alleged trafficking-ring leader

BBC Africa reported that Ethiopian federal police say they arrested 17 suspects, including alleged ringleader Mohammed Tahir (“Wordi”), in a 15-day operation in Addis Ababa and Harar. Police accuse the network of the deaths of 60 migrants, sexual abuse of women, and torturing Ethiopian migrants in Yemen while extracting more than 1 billion birr (about $6.1m) from victims’ families, and of moving more than 40,000 Ethiopians toward Saudi Arabia via Djibouti and Yemen.

The suspects have not commented. Police released their photographs.

SSPX stronghold in St. Marys, Kansas, after Vatican excommunication decree

This is Topeka / Kansas Reflector described how early-July Vatican measures against formal adherence to Society of Saint Pius X (SSPX) teachings land hardest in St. Marys, Kansas, where the traditionalist group has built the large Immaculata church and holds local political weight.

The Kansas Bureau of Investigation previously examined child sexual-abuse accusations involving SSPX and four dioceses. Those files are now with Attorney General Kris Kobach’s office, with at least one case still under review. Freedom Times covered UK and Irish SSPX chapels after the decree in earlier July roundups.

Source citations

Reformatorisch Dagblad (Netherlands): "Zuid-Korea arresteert Lee Man-hee, de 94-jarige ”Beloofde Herder” van de Shincheonji-sekte", 22 July 2026.

Refresher (Czechia): "Ulicemi Prahy prochází nebezpečná sekta. Starosta varoval obyvatele", 22 July 2026.

L’Indépendant (France): "Tour de France : "Je n'abandonnerai pas tant que je ne t'aurai pas retrouvée"… Enlevée par une secte, la petite cousine du maillot jaune Tadej Pogacar a disparu depuis 5 ans", 22 July 2026.

Telecinco (Spain): "La sombra de una secta tras la desaparición de Julija, la prima de Tadej Pogačar: la búsqueda se centra en Gran Canaria", 16 June 2026.

The Scotsman (UK): "Police Scotland investigating 'further' allegations against Mohamed Al Fayed", 26 July 2026.

BBC News (UK): "Police Scotland investigating Al Fayed abuse claims", 26 July 2026.

El País (Spain): "La terapeuta invisible que se coló en las vidas de los Andic, los Sánchez Vicario o los Urdangarin", 5 July 2026.

La Vanguardia (Spain): "La terapia de Jonathan Andic contemplaba someterse a una situación extrema al borde de un barranco", 22 July 2026.

La Vanguardia (Spain): "Las “terapias de experiencia extrema”, un conjunto de prácticas próximas a las pseudoterapias sin aval científico", 22 July 2026.

New York Post (US): "Mango heir's son told by therapist to confront father on 'edge of a cliff' days before fatal fall: report", 23 July 2026.

BBC News (UK): "Modelling scout linked to Epstein found dead in Paris", 22 July 2026.

LINDA. (Netherlands): "Vicky (56) zat in een sekte: 'Zijn zaad zou mij reinigen - en ik geloofde het nog ook'", 25 July 2026.

Médium.cz / Seznam (Czechia), České sekty a sekty v ČR: "Sekta Tartaria: Když se slovanský extremismus potká s mimozemšťany", 26 July 2026.

BBC News (UK): "The little-known Victorian sex cult where members were never allowed to leave", 26 July 2026.

BBC News (UK/Africa): "Ethiopia police arrest alleged leader of multi-million-dollar trafficking ring", 21 July 2026.

This is Topeka / Kansas Reflector (US): "What to know about the excommunicated Catholic sect known as SSPX and its ties to Kansas", 20 July 2026.