CultNEWS101 Articles: 5/20/226

[Patrick Ryan]

International News

Aljazeera: Senior Sri Lankan monk arrested for alleged child sex crimes

Pallegama Hemarathana is accused of abusing an 11-year-old girl in a temple.

"A prominent Buddhist monk has been arrested in Sri Lanka for allegedly sexually abusing an 11-year-old girl, in the highest-profile case involving a local religious leader.

Authorities took 71-year-old Pallegama Hemarathana into custody on Saturday from a private hospital in the capital, Colombo, where he had checked in for treatment as a criminal probe against him progressed.

Hemarathana is accused of committing the abuse in 2022 in a highly venerated temple in Anuradhapura, where he is the chief priest.

Authorities said the victim’s mother has also been arrested for aiding and abetting the monk."

Focus Taiwan: Spiritual leader, followers sentenced in Buddhist cult death case

"...Emergency services were called in July 2024 about a woman found lying motionless in a first-floor property on a residential block on Siwei Road in downtown Taipei.

After arriving at the scene, authorities found Tsai, a member of the religious group gathered at the meeting place, with no vital signs.

A subsequent autopsy determined she died of rhabdomyolysis, a complex medical condition involving the rapid dissolution of damaged or injured skeletal muscle.

It is most often caused by direct traumatic injury, according to the National Library of Medicine, a United States National Institutes of Health website.

Surveillance video footage, meanwhile, showed members of the group, including the victim, going to a tea shop near the group's meeting place on the evening of July 23, 2024, as Typhoon Gaemi was dumping rain on Taipei.

Several of those present were later recorded pulling Tsai's body back from the tea shop to their usual meeting place on a trolley, dumping it there, and then leaving it without calling emergency services.

After a probe and two rounds of searches, Taipei prosecutors indicted 13 suspects over Tsai's death in March 2025."

Domestic & True Crime Updates

Slate: When Violence Goes Viral

Internet gore videos are coming for a generation of chronically online teenagers. It’s turning human suffering into entertainment—and ruining lives in its wake.

"...764 is an online criminal network where vulnerable children are groomed, extorted, and manipulated into engaging in escalating acts of harm. Found on encrypted platforms like Discord and Telegram, members coerce victims to film or photograph themselves creating extreme content, including self-harm, pornography, animal abuse, and sibling assault. Often young victims are coerced into creating “cut signs” or “blood walls,” a form of self-harm where the victim carves out the name of a member of 764 on their body or writes it in blood on a wall or piece of paper. They’re even convinced to harm family pets. While victims are usually underage girls between 10 and 17, many of the predators orchestrating these acts of violence are teenage boys. The content is then circulated around the group. “The more extreme, the better,” former federal prosecutor Carin Duryee told ABC."

News Channel 5: School killer was likely egged on by online extremist 'handlers,' investigators say

In recording, Solomon Henderson attributed killing at Nashville's Antioch High School to Maniac Murder Cult and 764

An exclusive NewsChannel 5 investigation discovered that the shooter in the January 2025 Nashville Antioch High School shooting appears to have had “handlers” associated with violent extremist groups who were encouraging him.

Solomon Henderson, 17, left behind a recording in which he attributed the deadly school shooting to Maniac Murder Cult and 764, investigators say. Both groups target children online around the globe, leaving behind a trail of victims.

Antioch High School student Dayana Escalante, 16, became one of those victims."

"...Dr. Amy Cooter, who studies extremism, has carefully followed the Antioch High School shooter's digital trail. She is one of the founders of the Institute for Countering Digital Extremism.

We asked Cooter, "Is there any doubt in your mind that he had somebody somewhere egging him on?"

“No," she answered. "Whether that person knew exactly what he was planning and for what date, I don't know. But I think there were several people in his ear saying, ‘Yes, commit some violence, commit some attack, this is a good thing.’"

Solomon Henderson, they believe, had become ensnared in a dark web known as "nihilistic violent extremism," a network of various groups, some with neo-Nazi connections.

Among those groups are ones like the Maniacs Murder Cult, Order of Nine Angles and No Lives Matter."

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