Lyle Jeffs: Polygamist sect leader finally caught by FBI after year on the run
Mr Jeffs was arrested in South Dakota
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Your support makes all the difference.Polygamist Mormon sect leader Lyle Jeffs has been captured in South Dakota after being on the run for almost a year.
The FBI had been looking for him since June 2016 when he escaped from house confinement in Utah after slipping off his GPS ankle monitor. He had been placed on house arrest while awaiting trial for his alleged involvement in a multimillion scheme to defraud the US’s food stamps programme.
After he escaped, the FBI had issued a $50,000 reward and a wanted poster saying that Mr Jeffs should be considered armed and dangerous.
The bureau announced its capture in a Thursday morning tweet: “#ARRESTED: FLDS leader Lyle Jeffs in custody after nearly a year on the lam.”
Mr Jeffs became the leader of his Mormon sect, the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, after his notorious older brother, Warren Jeffs, was jailed .
The Jeffs' church split off from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the 1930s after the Mormon establishment rejected polygamy.
Prosecutors accused Mr Jeffs and other sect leaders of instructing followers to buy items with their food stamp cards and give them to a church warehouse where leaders decided how to distribute products to followers.
Food stamps were also cashed at sect-owned stores without the users getting anything in return and the money was then diverted to front companies and used to pay thousands for a tractor, truck and other items, prosecutors have said.
The defendants denied wrongdoing and said they were sharing food as part of their communal living practices.
Mr Jeffs was the last of the defendants in the food stamp fraud case still behind bars when US District Judge Ted Stewart reversed an earlier decision and granted his release in June 2016. Prosecutors argued Mr Jeffs was a flight risk.
While Mr Jeffs was a fugitive, nine of the 10 other people charged in the high-profile February 2016 bust accepted plea deals. Charges against one man were dismissed.
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