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	Swami “hunkered Down” on Mexican Border, Feds Say The Statesman March 31, 2011 http://www.statesman.com/blogs/content/shared-gen/blogs/austin/courts/entries/2011/03/31/swami_hunkered_down_on_mexican.html?cxntcid=breaking_news U.S. Marshals say they are reasonably confident that Prakashanand Saraswati is “hunkered down” in Nuevo Laredo, said Hector Gomez, supervising deputy marshal of the agency’s Austin office. “I really think we’ve got him landlocked now,” he said. And Gomez said he expected new charges to be filed eventually against devotees who helped the guru escape: “When it’s all said and done, we’re going to catch a lot of people in a lot of lies.” Prakashanand, the founder and leader of the Barsana Dham ashram in Driftwood, disappeared two days after he was convicted on 20 counts of indecency with a child by sexual contact. The charges were based on the accounts of two women who said the guru, known to his devotees as Swamiji, molested them when they were young teens living on the ashram in the mid-1990s. Gomez declined to identify how the marshals knew Prakashanand was hiding out in the border city, but he said the latest hard evidence of the guru’s location was reliable as of about a week ago. He also said the agency has evidence that Prakashanand left the country “with loads of cash,” presumably to use to bribe a pilot to fly him out of Mexico, probably to India. The guru’s passport was confiscated by Hays County authorities late last year, prior to his trial. Gomez said that, while Mexico has an extradition treaty with the United States, Prakashanand, should he be arrested, would most likely be returned to this country under the deportation process. In that case, Mexican authorities would label him an undesirable alien, which would leave him with no legal status to remain in that country.
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