A court in Turkey sentenced a televangelist, who had young women around him and called them "kittens", to 8.658 years in prison.
Adnan Oktar, the leader of the cult, was convicted of sexual assault and abuse of minors.
The sixty-six-year-old televangelist was at the head of a television channel through which he gave religious sermons.
Oktar is a fierce opponent of the theory of evolution, he wrote a book about creationism that was the subject of public ridicule.
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He was initially sentenced to 1.075 years in prison, but the appeals court ordered a retrial against 215 defendants, including Otkar.
Ten were sentenced to 8.658 years in prison, while others received shorter sentences.
Oktar and hundreds of his followers were arrested in 2018 in his home.
They are accused of a number of criminal acts such as running a criminal organization, tax violations, sexual abuse, as well as suspicion of terrorism.
At the time of his arrest, Oktar told reporters that the charges against him were "lies" and "a game by the British deep state," which he has often spoken about in the past.
In January 2021, he was convicted on 10 separate charges, including leading a criminal group, engaging in political and military espionage, sexual abuse of minors, rape, blackmail and torture.
He is also accused of alleged ties to exiled cleric Fethullah Gulen, whom the Turkish government accuses of orchestrating a failed military coup in 2016 that killed 251 people and injured more than 2.000.
The High Court overturned that verdict.
Due to the views he propagated, Oktar became notorious in Turkey and abroad, and he was arrested several times until 2018.
Before his latest arrest, he was in prison and in a psychiatric clinic several times.
Libraries all over Turkey are famous for copies of the book on creationism "Atlas of Creation", although he did not ask for it.
In the book, he claimed that Darwin's theory of evolution is the root of global terrorism.
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