Evangelist compound raided in child sex investigation
Social workers are interviewing children who live at an evangelist group's headquarters after FBI agents and police raided the compound in a child porn probe.
The raid at the Tony Alamo Christian Ministries in Fouke, south of Texarkana, Arkansas, started an hour before sunset yesterday, but state police said no-one was arrested.
Armed guards regularly patrol the headquarters of the group - which critics call a cult - but there was no resistance as agents moved in.
Tom Browne, who runs the FBI office in Little Rock, said the investigation involved the Mann Act, which bans the transportation of children across state lines for criminal activity.
"Children living at the facility may have been sexually and physically abused," Browne said.
Tony Alamo - who was once accused of child abuse and has been convicted of tax evasion - denied any involvement in pornography.
"We don't go into pornography; nobody in the church is into that," he said.
"Where do these allegations stem from? The anti-Christ government. The Catholics don't like me because I have cut their congregation in half. They hate true Christianity."
About 100 state and government law officers raided the 15-acre compound housing the ministry, which the Southern Poverty Law Centre describes as a cult that opposes homosexuality, Catholicism and the US government.
The ministry's website says it is "dedicated to spreading the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ and the winning of souls worldwide".
John Selig, head of the Arkansas Department of Human Services, said state workers were talking to children.
"I can't say whether we will be removing any children," he said, adding that he did not know how many lived there.
US Attorney Bob Balfe said before the raid that he expected an arrest warrant would be issued later for Mr Alamo.
The FBI and state police issued a statement saying that every minor at the Alamo complex would be interviewed and that officials hoped to reunite children with parents at the site as quickly as possible.
Shortly after the raid began, a sport-utility vehicle hauling a trailer backed up to the ministry building's front door. FBI vehicles blocked a dead-end road.
A Fouke School District bus also arrived and pulled up near 12 unmarked vans, SUVs and saloons parked alongside the low-slung ministry headquarters along US 71 just inside the city limits of tiny Fouke.
Mr Alamo's church is in a single-storey building that looks like a strip mall. A white cross stands atop the structure, with a small steeple to the right side. A helicopter circled overhead, and onlookers stopped along the two-lane highway to watch the raid.
Mr Alamo was once accused in California of directing the beating of a church member's 11-year-old son. In 1994, he was sentenced to six years in prison on tax evasion charges filed in Memphis, Tennessee.
The judge in the tax case ordered him held pending sentencing after prosecutors argued that the evangelist was a flight risk and a polygamist who preyed on married women and girls in his congregation.
US District Judge Jon McCalla said he was concerned over "the very great control Mr Alamo has over a number of people".
Mr Alamo said today that he believed the raid was part of a push by the government to make same-sex marriage legal while outlawing polygamy.
