US police arrested the leader of a renegade Amish group and six others in eastern Ohio today and charged them with hate crimes for a series of beard and hair cutting assaults against Amish men and women.
The distinctive beards worn by married Amish men, and the uncut hair that married women keep rolled in a bun, are treasured symbols of religious identity, and the attacks appeared designed to inflict humiliation, said Donald B. Kraybill, an expert on the Amish at Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania.
In a case that drew wide attention because of the unusual nature of the attacks, five of the men were arrested last month on kidnapping and other state charges, and were out on bail.
At the time of those arrests, officials said the founder of the breakaway group, Sam Mullet (66) had not taken part directly in the nighttime assaults against his perceived enemies, and he was not initially charged.
But at 6am today the FBI and local sheriffs raided the splinter settlement near the village of Bergholz, arresting Mr Mullet, three of his sons and three other followers on federal hate-crime and conspiracy charges.
"We believe these attacks were religiously motivated," Steven M. Dettelbach, the US attorney for the northern district of Ohio, said in a telephone interview. "While people are free to disagree about religion in this country, we don't settle those disagreements with late night visits, dangerous weapons and violent attacks."
In at least four violent attacks over the past few months, groups of men from Mr Mullet's compound held men down to shear their beards with scissors and battery-operated clippers. In one case several of Mullet's nephews also hacked off the hair of their own mother - Mr Mullet's sister - who had fled the compound years earlier.
One victim told investigators that "he would prefer to have been beaten black and blue than to suffer the disfigurement and humiliation of having his hair removed," according to the FBI affidavit supporting the hate-crime charges.
The attacks caused fear and bewilderment among the 60,000 Amish of Ohio, who are pacifists and reject the idea of revenge.
Former residents of Mr Mullet's compound said he exerted iron control over the settlement of 120, many of them his relatives, sometimes imprisoning men in a chicken coop for days or beating them. Former residents also said that Mullet had sex with married women in the community "to cleanse them of the devil," according to the FBI affidavit.
Mr Mullet moved with some followers to an isolated valley near Bergholz in 1995 after conflicts with Amish leaders in another part of the state. He was ordained as a minister in 1997 and later as a bishop. But he fell out with other Amish bishops in eastern Ohio, who determined that his effort to excommunicate eight families that left his compound in 2005 was not justified.
Mullet has apparently nursed a grudge ever since, and the recent victims included bishops who opposed his excommunication decrees as well as people who aided those who fled from his community.
The seven men were to be arraigned tomorrow in Youngstown, Ohio.
Agencies