MOSCOW, December 26. /TASS/. A Moscow court has sentenced three members of the extremist organization called the Jehovah's Witness Administrative Center in Russia (designated as an extremist group and banned in Russia) to prison terms ranging from 6.5 years to 7.5 years, the Russian Investigative Committee said.

The court ruled that evidence collected by the committee’s Moscow office was "sufficient to sentence three defendants aged from 46 years to 59 years old," the agency said. The people were found guilty of organizing the activities of an extremist organization, it said.

The court sentenced Aleksander Rumyantsev to 7.5 years, Sean Pike to 7 years, and Eduard Sviridov to 6.5 years of standard-security prison.

The investigation and the court found that from September 2017 to April 2020, a group of individuals ran the organization called the Jehovah's Witness Administrative Center in Russia, which had been designated by the Russian Supreme Court as an extremist organization. It held its clandestine gatherings in several Moscow apartments, where its members studied religious literature and carried out other activities that are characteristic of this association. The group’s organizers also held online video meetings, made efforts to recruit and recruited new participants in Moscow and other constituent regions of the Russian Federation.

Investigative Committee staff acted jointly with other law enforcement agencies to uncover and put an end to the criminal activity of the three organizers of the banned group. Investigators carried out a considerable amount of work such as identifying and questioning witnesses and conducting complex examinations of a large amount of extremist literature. The outcome of the work, coupled with some other evidence, fully proved the defendants were guilty of the crime.