Shocking footage showing a South Korean pastor beating her followers and ordering them to beat one another has emerged as South Korean police investigate claims that she ran a cult in Fiji, forcing people to work without pay and endure violent rituals.
The footage appears to show violent assaults on members of the South Korean Grace Road Church.
Pastor Shin Ok-ju was arrested last month along with three other church leaders when they landed at Incheon International Airport just outside of Seoul.
About 400 of her followers had moved to Fiji since 2014 after Shin predicted a famine would come across the Korean Peninsula and that Fiji was a promised land where they could survive.
However, once the group arrived, former members claim their passports were confiscated and they were made to work without pay and perform ritual beatings on each other, called “threshing floors.”
The footage, shared with the Guardian by South Korean police as they prepared to go to Fiji to continue investigations into the group, shows some of the beatings that took place in the South Korean branch of the church.
Followers say the assaults continued in Fiji.
The footage was originally broadcast in an episode of weekly South Korean television program Unanswered Questions, on the Seoul Broadcasting System, last month.
In several videos, Shin is shown calling members of the church forward during her sermons and then hitting them on the face, pulling and cutting their hair, and throwing them to the ground.
In one video, Shin is seen instructing a girl, who appears to be a teenager, to slap a woman, believed to be her mother. After the girl hits her softly, Shin admonishes her, saying: “You’re hitting the cheeks of the enemy.”
The girl goes on to hit the woman 25 times. Later, the woman is shown repeatedly hitting the girl and forcefully pulling her hair.
In a lengthy statement, a spokesperson for the Grace Road Group did not deny beatings occurred.
The spokesperson said Shin “has biblically rebuked people by publicly reproving them so that they would turn back and no longer sin.”
“Threshing floor is written throughout the whole Bible... Grace Road Church alone has carried out the perfectly biblical threshing floor,” the spokesperson said.
The footage also includes allegations from witnesses that a man in his 70s, who was a member of the church and had traveled to Fiji, was subject to a beating in which he was hit 600 to 700 times by a number of church members over several hours.
The program alleged that when he went to work the next day he could barely walk and was covered in bruises. He later returned to South Korea and eventually saw a doctor who told the television program that the man had suffered a subdural hematoma. The man died a year later.
Grace Road, which says it is not a cult, denies any connection between the man’s death and any alleged beating.
“If the man indeed died from being beaten hundreds of times, would his wife, his son, his daughter-in-law, and his grandchildren stay happily in the church that supposedly beat their husband and father?” the church said in a statement.
Arum Song, the son of the man who died, told the program his father died from an unrelated illness and that while his father had participated in the threshing floor, he had merely slapped himself, and was not beaten by anyone else.
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