Prosecutor: Polygamist sect leader came home for weddings

Witnesses say mobile home was used as chapel to wed girls

Associated Press/June 10, 2006

Salt Lake City, Utah -- Arizona's attorney general believes polygamist leader Warren Jeffs recently returned to perform more marriages involving underage girls in his church's community along the Utah-Arizona state line.

"I've heard from a number of different sources who said he's been here," Attorney General Terry Goddard told the Deseret Morning News for Saturday editions. "They said he's performed marriages and pointed out a mobile home they said was the wedding chapel."

Jeffs, one of the FBI's 10 most wanted fugitives, is accused of arranging marriages between underage girls and older men as the leader of a Mormon splinter group called the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.

He is charged with child sexual abuse in Arizona and being an accomplice to statutory rape in Utah.

FLDS church members live mostly in the border towns of Hildale, Utah, and Colorado City, Arizona.

Salt Lake City FBI spokesman Bob Wright said Saturday that he could not provide specifics on the search for Jeffs.

Goddard said he plans to meet with FBI officials Monday.

Jeffs also faces federal charges of unlawful flight to avoid prosecution. He was added last month to the FBI's Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list, and a $100,000 reward is being offered for information leading to his arrest.