school in Beslan, southern Russia, in 2004 and promised them that he would resurrect their children for a fee. On July 16, 2004 a photo of Grabovoi with the then-President of Kazakhstan, Nursultan Nazarbayev, appeared on Grabovoi's website along with a statement granting him permission to spread his teachings. In response, the Embassy of Kazakhstan stated that the documents supporting Grabovoi's teachings in the republic all had signs of forgery. After the affair with the mothers of Beslan, a correspondent for the daily newspaper Izvestia managed to meet Grabovoi, who at the time referred to himself as the second coming of Jesus Christ and announced that he would become Russian president in 2008. He tried to solve his problems with the press by offering a bribe of $25,000. The issue of Izvestia following the meeting provoked an international scandal: Grabovoi forged Nazarbayev's signature on a document that showed that the president of Kazakhstan was a member of his sect and had chosen Grabovoi's teachings as state ideologies. The Moscow Public Prosecutor's Office subsequently launched an investigation into these facts. Journalists from NTV, the BBC, Radio Liberty, the Tribuna newspaper, the Regnum news agency and dozens of other media outlets in the regions of Russia and Kazakhstan subsequently joined the investigation into the activities of the Grabovoi sect. In a March–April 2007 Susanna Dudieva, leader of Mothers of Beslan committee, told reporter Larisa Bochanov that Grabovoi had fallen victim to a smear campaign aimed at diverting attention from the authorities' poor handling of the Beslan hostage-taking. Dudieva named some journalists who she claimed spread false information, often the opposite information that she had reported to them. Among those named were Vladimir Vorsobin of Komsomolskaya Pravda, Dmitri Sokolov of Izvestia, and Alexey Pimanov of the TV show Man and Order. However Dudieva lost her job at the time because she joined Grabovoi's sect and promised resurrections. According to Jelena Milashina from Novaya Gazeta, the authorities arrested Grabovoi on charges of fraud. Milashina wrote that the Ostankino department of the Prosecutor General of Russia threatened to sue the television show Man and Order for incitement of religious hatred. According to Milashina, Evgeny Saurov, who had filed charges against Grabovoi two years earlier, was prosecuted himself on an unrelated charge. Milashina claimed that Grabovoi was arrested on the orders of Vladimir Putin. Grabovoi sued the newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda for 1.2 billion rubles but lost