An unprecedented verdict - 11 years behind bars - has been handed to a cult leader for fraud, a seemingly harsh punishment until one learns that Grigory Grabovoi promised grieving mothers to resurrect their children for a fee.

The judge, reading the verdict on July 7, explained that Grabovoi had essentially embezzled his victims by using "psychological pressure." "Grabovoi told citizens that their relatives have been resurrected and their meeting will soon take place," RIA Novosti quoted the Tagansky District Court statement as saying.

Grabovoi's most well-known victims are the Beslan mothers - women who lost their children in a bloody hostage taking when terrorists seized a school in the North Ossetian town of Beslan in September 2004. To make his services look legal, the psychic offered contracts to his clients.

In 2003, for instance, a man paid Grabovoy about $1,700 save his parents from death. A woman ended up paying him $5,000 to resurrect her two dead sons.

With some lawmakers taking efforts to rein in the otherwise uncontrolled world of the occult, Grabovoi has probably been the most controversial psychic in recent Russian history, which has had its share of cult figures claiming to "cure" ailments over television.

Grabovoi was detained for his current crimes by police on April 5, 2006 during a lecture he was giving at a Moscow hotel. He launched his occult career in the mid 1990s, and had since then established his own foundation, which attributes a whole array of titles to Grabovoi, including that of Knight of the Maltese order. In 2004, he announced that he was Jesus Christ come back to earth. He then went further still, saying he had the powers of God. At one point, in order to save the world from an imminent catastrophe, Grabovoi and his followers insisted that he must become the next Russian president in 2008. Pending his success, Grabovoi promised to pay each Russian citizen 12,000 rubles a month (at the time the promise was made it was an equivalent of $433, twice average monthly salary Russians received at that time), which he calculated as a distribution of the GDP's 10 percent growth rate. Among his more ambitious legislative endeavors was a proposed law to ban death on Russian territory. In fact, he has already at work on eliminating death by selling special stickers. If stuck to walls around a perimeter, Grabovoi says the stickers create a "no-death zone."

Grabovoi once claimed that he had a license to work in Kazkhastan, issued by the president himself, Nursultan Nazarbayev. The Kazakh Embassy in Moscow denied this, RIA Novosti reported.

By Stacey Sweeney