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	US Marshals: Swami Moving South? By Eric Dexheimer The Statesman May 13, 2011 Prakashanand Saraswati, the Hindu guru who disappeared in early March, two days after being convicted of molesting two teenage girls on the ashram he founded, is no longer believed to be hiding out near the U.S.-Mexico border, but now may have moved farther south toward Central or even South America, a U.S. Marshal said. “We’ve asked [the international police organization] Interpol to add Central and South America to its watch list,” said Hector Gomez, supervising deputy marshal of the agency’s Austin office. “We heard he may be crawling that direction, toward Panama, Belize, Costa Rica or even South American.” But, he added, “Honestly, we don’t know where he’s at right now.” Until recently, law enforcement officials said they believed that the 82-year-old Prakashanand, known to his followers as Shree Swamiji, was hunkered down in the Laredo area, trying to arrange transportation out of Mexico to Nepal or India, where he keeps another home. Such a transaction would most likely have to be conducted illegally, as Hays County officials confiscated the guru’s passport late last year. Even though Prakashanand may have slipped out of the border area while avoiding detection by law enforcement, Gomez said he remains confident the convicted religious leader is still in the same hemisphere. “I still hold that if he was in India, we’d know about it,” he said. Prakashanand founded the Barsana Dham ashram in Driftwood in the early 1990s and was its spiritual leader until a Hays County jury in early March found him guilty of 20 counts of indecency with a child by sexual contact. Prosecutors brought the case after three now-adult women came forwarded and asserted the guru had groped them while they were growing up at the 200-acre religious center in the mid-1990s. The day before Prakashanand was to be sentenced, however, he and his personal assistant disappeared. Although at first he was rumored to have run north with the help of his devotees, authorities later focused their attention on the Texas-Mexico border area. He was subsequently sentenced in absentia to 14 years in prison. In recent weeks, Barsana Dham has moved aggressively on the Internet to wipe out all traces of its connection to the guru. The name of the ashram has been changed to JKP Radha Madhav Dham. On its new website, pictures or mentions of Prakashanand are nowhere to be found.
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