VANCOUVER, Canada - An 81-year-old member of a Christian sect that has a history of religiously motivated arson appeared naked in a British Columbia court on Tuesday to stand trial for allegedly setting fire to a building.
Mary Braun, a member of the Sons of Freedom, a sect of the Doukhobor religious faith, is accused of damaging a community college computer lab early this month near Nelson, British Columbia, in the Canadian province's southeastern Kootenay region. She has pleaded not guilty to the arson charge.
Braun did not testify on the first day of her trial in British Columbia Provincial Court in Nelson. She declined to wear clothes at the hearing for religious reasons, according to witnesses.
The Sons of Freedom sect waged a campaign for Doukhobor ''purity'' in the 1950s that included burning their own homes, destroying government and private property and parading naked down public streets in Nelson and other towns in southern British Columbia.
Braun previously had been arrested for arson, but a police spokesman did not have information on the outcome of that case. The new charges were the first to be brought against a member of the Sons of Freedom in several years.
The Sons of Freedom are viewed as being an extremist sect of the Doukhobors, an obscure group of Russian Christians whose beliefs include pacifism and total equality. The group emigrated to Western Canada in the late 1800s to escape brutal persecution.
Doukhobors have recently been pressuring British Columbia to apologize for the province's decision to put Doukhobor children in an internment camp in the 1950s so they could be forced to attend public school over their parents' objections.