Children were rescued from a cult in the US (Picture: YouTube / EXPLORE WITH US)
Shocking footage has been released of the moment two young girls were found hidden inside a barrel at a remote doomsday cult compound.
The girls were among six children rescued from a grim polygamist site made up of shipping containers in the Utah desert where kids were allegedly married off by their dads and sexually abused.
Disturbing clips recently emerged of police discovering the youngsters in Lund, around 275 miles south of Salt Lake City on a bitterly cold, dark night in December 2017.
John Coltharp had kidnapped all four of his children and handed his two daughters Dinah, eight, and Hattie, four, to his friend Samuel Shaffer who reportedly married them and hid them at the makeshift compound.
Police raided the site after Coltharp’s ex-wife Micha Coltharp reported the children missing, triggering a highly-publicised amber alert search operation.
When they arrived, they found Dinah and Hattie, as well as Coltharp’s daughters Lily, seven, and Samantha, five, who had not been reported missing.
The two youngest girls, Hattie and Samantha, were found in 50-gallon blue water barrels where they had been kept for more than 24 hours in sub-zero temperatures in an attempt to conceal them from cops.
Police found the children hidden inside blue barrels in freezing temperatures in Utah (Picture: YouTube / EXPLORE WITH US)
The girls are believed to have been married off by their fathers and sexually abused (Picture: YouTube / EXPLORE WITH US)
Chilling images showed each of them barefoot in thin leggings and pyjama bottoms being rescued from the barrels, while the older girls were found in an abandoned trailer.
Coltharp’s sons William, seven, and Seth, six, were found earlier the same day. All of the children were dehydrated, reports MailOnline.
Both cult leaders were jailed after police feared Coltharp planned to marry his daughters off to Shaffer who was described as the ‘prophet’ of the group they’d formed, called Knights of the Crystal Blade.
Police believe Shaffer was grooming Coltharp to take over as the ‘prophet’ of the cult and court documents showed they’d both married a relative of the other.
They were being held at a polygamous compound in the Utah desert (Picture: YouTube / EXPLORE WITH US)
The girls were barefoot and only had thin bottoms on when they were found in the bitterly cold weather (Picture: YouTube / EXPLORE WITH US)
Prosecutors said they had secretly married each other’s two daughters, who were aged four to eight.
Authorities also said the two older girls were sexually abused by the two men, whose group was based on arcane Mormon ideas long abandoned by the mainstream church.
Shaffer, who was aged 34 when he pleaded guilty to child rape and abuse images in May 2018, was jailed for at least 26 years.
Three months later, Coltharp, then 35, admitted to sodomy and child bigamy charges and was locked up for at least 25 years.
Dinah, left, was reported missing along with her sister Hattie and two brothers William and Seth (Picture: Facebook)
The remote compound where the children were found (Picture: KUTV2)
On a website they had created about their cult, Shaffer wrote: ‘A man to whom a woman is sealed need merely place his wife’s hand in the hand of another and she shall be submissive to him to whom she has been given.
‘Whether it is to be temporary permission or eternal union according to the order, she may have intercourse with him and he with she.’
They were brought to justice after Coltharp’s wife Micha had fought for custody of their four children when he took them to join Shaffer.
Coltharp’s sister Cindi Ray also said her brother was a ‘doomsday prepper’ and feared that he was grooming Dinah and Hattie for child marriage.
John Coltharp was jailed for at least 25 years (Picture: AP)
Samuel Shaffer faces at least 26 years behind bars (Picture: AP)
The authorities said the men took the children to the compound in the wilderness in preparation for an apocalypse or in hopes of gaining followers.
Shaffer admitted the girls were being hidden from police when he was questioned.
Michael Lee, Coltharp’s brother-in-law, believes they had gone off the grid in hopes of gaining cult followers or joining another group.
Their religious cult was described by the men as a ‘fundamentalist group for millennials’ and believed a Muslim invasion of the US and an apocalypse was imminent.
Shaffer pictured with his daughters Samantha and Lily (Picture: Facebook)
Prosecutors say Shaffer, pictured, and Coltharp believed in doomsday and polygamy (Picture: AP)
Coltharp is believed to have been marrying off his daughters to Shaffer (Picture: KSTU)
Coltharp had claimed he was speaking at the lord’s command and that the US government and other governments worldwide would be torn down.
‘He calls himself Samuel the Seer,’ Micha said of her ex-husband’s accomplice when her children were missing.
‘He believes that he holds the keys of this dispensation, that he has been many people throughout the history of time, that he has been reincarnated and they’re following his prophecies.’
Both polygamy and bigamy are illegal in the US, but Utah, a state home to a large Mormon community, does not prosecute polygamists who are law-abiding, giving way to the ‘Sister Wives’ phenomenon which is seen in some areas of the state.
Last year, British teenager Alex Batty returned to the UK six years after he was kidnapped by his mother and taken to live a cult-lifestyle.
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They were allegedly married off by their fathers and sexually abused.