Tantric yoga guru arrested in international sex slave raid

A yoga guru accused of running an international tantric sex slave ring using “mental manipulation” to “eliminate consent” has been arrested in a massive raid spanning Paris and southern France.

Gregorian Bivolaru, 71, from Romania, was arrested alongside 40 others in a vast police operation involving 175 officers that caught various alleged senior members of the suspected sect he ran across dozens of countries, notably Romania, Sweden and France.

Police said they “freed” 26 women, several of whom were allegedly held against their will by the network called Movement for Spiritual Integration into the Absolute (MISA).

The group, which is believed to have “several hundred” members, runs several yoga schools and related operations. It is claimed to have organised orgies in the guru’s honour and forced followers under its sway to partake in commercial pornography to fund the organisation.

The arrests in Paris, Seine-et-Marne, Val-de-Marne and Alpes-Maritimes areas follow a probe into the suspected sect launched by Paris prosecutors in July, on suspicion of kidnapping, rape, people trafficking and “abuse of weakness in an organised gang by members of a sect”.

The investigation followed a complaint by France’s Human Rights League, a human rights NGO, after it received statements from 12 former MISA members alleging widespread abuse, a judiciary source said.

MISA, which became known as Atman after its expansion beyond Romania, allegedly taught tantra yoga with the aim of “conditioning victims to accept sexual relations via mental manipulation techniques which sought to eliminate any notion of consent”.

‘A thousand virgin girls’

Women were encouraged to accept sexual relations with the group’s leader, and “to agree to participate in fee-paying pornographic practices in France and abroad”, the source said.

In 2016, one of his victims, Agnes Arabela Marques, who had a relationship with Bivolaru when she was 15, claimed the guru insisted that having sex with him would raise her spiritual level.

“Bivolaru was interested in an Indian myth that said you could get to a high spiritual level if you had sex with 1,000 virgin girls,” she was cited as saying by British media at the time. “He knew the age of each girl he had sex with because he received photos from his yoga students and the date of birth was written on the back.”

“Bivolaru claimed that, if I had sex with him as a yoga master, I could achieve superior levels of tantric spirituality,” she claimed.

Ms Marques said there were “constantly girls that were there to have sex with him”.

“The girls living in that apartment would spend a few days or even a few weeks there and afterwards their place would be taken by other girls.”

Bivolaru was arrested in a house in Ivry-sur-Seine, in the Val-de-Marne, where, according to his alleged victims, he held tantra yoga “sexual initiation” sessions for followers.

He is considered to be the “spiritual leader” of the Atman yoga federation which operates in 31 mostly European countries. Its French arm is called Yoga Integral and has branches in Paris, Nice and Poitiers.

According to testimonies of three alleged former victims to Libération newspaper, various women were held in “cramped and unhygienic conditions” in several homes in the Paris region in order to “satisfy the guru’s sexual appetites”.

Known as Grieg to his followers, Bivolaru founded MISA,  the original association, in Romania in 1990 in the wake of the fall of dictator Nicolae Ceausescu.

He then allegedly established a personality cult, including “orgies in his honour”, the paper said.

‘A man of God’

At that time, the Romanian authorities accused Bivolaru of human trafficking and tax evasion, forcing him into exile. He was granted political asylum in Sweden in 2005, along with a new identity under the name Magnus Aurolsson.

Two Danish MEPs even defended Bivolaru before the European courts, claiming that he was the victim of political persecution and that the Romanian judicial system was not independent.

Ulla Sandbaek, an MEP until 2004 and a member of the Danish Parliament until 2019, was a regular follower of the Danish branch of the federation, Natha.

In an interview broadcast ten years ago by a MISA TV channel, she claimed that Bivolaru was “a man of God who works for the benefit of humanity”.

The association and its teachers were expelled from the international and European yoga federations in 2008 for alleged “pornographic” activities.

Atman denied the allegations and asserted that the Romanian secret services had tortured followers to force them to testify against their founder. The federation’s website claims Bivolaru is the victim of a wide-ranging plot to discredit him.

In 2013, Bivolaru was sentenced to six years in prison in Romania for raping a minor, and was extradited from France in 2016. He spent just one year in Romanian jail before being released and returning to Scandinavia.

Six Finnish followers then filed a complaint against Bivolaru for “human trafficking”, and in 2017 Helsinki issued an international arrest warrant through Interpol. Since then, he has continued to preach and practice from Paris.

According to testimonies from former followers, members of Atman’s associations were forced to work for free in strip clubs and massage parlours, or to make commercial pornographic films in Romania, Hungary and the Czech Republic.

Such “multiple forms of prostitution” allegedly enabled the movement to finance itself. Some members reportedly also donate part of their salary to the organisation, or have made substantial donations to build new “ashrams”.

Atmas, the international federation of yoga and meditation is headquartered in Cambridgeshire in the UK. Its website includes links to a yoga organisation with centres in London and Oxford. They had not responded to the Telegraph’s requests for comment on Tuesday evening.