The high-profile suspect went missing for years until he was arrested by police in France in 2023 on a long list of suspected offences, including kidnapping and rape.
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File photo of Helsinki District Court. Image: Mimmi Nietula / Yle
Charges against a high-profile tantric yoga guru have been dropped in Finland, following a decision by Helsinki District Court, as the suspect will stand trial in France.
Yle’s investigative journalism unit MOT first reported suspicions of abuse within the Movement for Spiritual Integration into the Absolute (Misa) in 2013, when a Finnish woman in her 20s told the programme she had been sexually abused in Paris by the founder of the yoga federation.
Following the broadcast, Finland’s National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) opened a case file to look into reports that Finnish citizens had been lured to France — where they then became the victims of crimes.
This led to a Finnish prosecutor filing charges — including sexual abuse and aggravated human trafficking — against the founder of Misa in 2017.
A trial was due to begin in Helsinki in 2018 but could not go ahead as authorities were unable to locate the suspect. He was known to have been released in 2017 from a six-year prison sentence in Romania but then disappeared.
Finnish authorities issued a European arrest warrant for the suspect, and he was eventually detained by police in France in 2023, where he is also suspected of a slew of offences, including kidnapping and rape.
Finnish authorities have since made several attempts to bring the man to Finland to stand trial, but last year French authorities requested that the case be transferred to France.
The prosecutor in Finland agreed, and Helsinki District Court’s ruling ratified that decision.
The man is now expected to stand trial in France next year or in 2027.