Yisrael Amir was only 14-years-old when he was snatched from Israel to Guatemala by his father using forged passports to live among an extremist Jewish cult.
The teenager and his five siblings were promised that their new life in Central America would be idyllic - that they would live in a big house in a good neighbourhood, surrounded by beautiful lakes.
But Yisrael soon found out that he had entered a psychological prison - where life would become about pleasing the tyrannical leader of a fundamentalist sect whose members have now been convicted of crimes against children.
Lev Tahor, Hebrew for ‘pure heart’, was founded in 1988 by Shlomo Helbrans in Israel, but the globetrotting group has slipped between the borders of the Jewish state, New York, Guatemala and Mexico to escape the authorities.
Yisrael escaped its grips in 2019, after five years of being subjected to horrors - including witnessing child abuse, being made to marry at 16, experiencing starvation and being coerced into taking psychiatric drugs.
