Polygamist Warren Jeffs hospitalized in Las Vegas

LAS VEGAS " Polygamist sect leader Warren Jeffs was being treated Wednesday under police guard and an assumed name at a Las Vegas hospital after authorities said he was transferred from a jail in Kingman, Ariz.

Sunrise Hospital and Medical Center spokesman Dan Davidson said he had no patient listed under Jeffs' name, and said he could provide no further information.

Las Vegas police and Mohave County, Ariz., sheriffs deputies provided tight security around the hospital where Mohave County Sheriff Tom Sheahan said the 52-year-old president of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints was flown Tuesday.

Sheahan didn't specify Jeffs' medical problem, but said it was serious enough to move him about 100 miles from Kingman Medical Center to a hospital several blocks east of the Las Vegas Strip.

Jeffs heads the FLDS, an insular faith of nearly 6,000 that practices polygamy in arranged marriages that have sometimes involved underage girls. One of their ranches was raided in west Texas in April, setting off a lengthy legal battle over the custody of hundreds of children.

Jeffs' Las Vegas lawyer, Richard Wright, did not immediately respond Wednesday to messages from The Associated Press.

Jeffs was convicted by a Utah jury last year on two counts of first-degree felony rape as an accomplice. He was sentenced to two consecutive terms of five years to life in prison for his role in the 2001 marriage of a 14-year-old follower to her 19-year-old cousin.

Jeffs is charged in Arizona as an accomplice with four counts of sexual conduct with a minor stemming from the marriages of two girls. He had also been charged with four counts of incest as an accomplice, but those charges were dropped last month.

The sect leader has had several health complications during his jail stay, including a trip to a prison infirmary because of a self-imposed fast.

Jeffs also attempted suicide last year in a Utah jail, and was seen throwing himself against the walls and banging his head, authorities said.

Jeffs was arrested in August 2006 outside Las Vegas, after a Nevada state trooper pulled over a Cadillac Escalade driven by Jeffs' brother, Isaac Jeffs, on Interstate 15. The trooper said he couldn't make out a temporary Colorado paper license tag on the vehicle.

Jeffs had been on the run for more than a year, and made the FBI's Most Wanted List before his capture. Authorities reported finding disguises and $54,000 in cash in the vehicle, along with letters from FLDS followers, laptop computers and recording devices.

In dropping the accomplice to incest charges last month, Mohave County Superior Court Judge Steven Conn found that state incest law does not apply to the arranged marriages of two teenage girls and their older male relatives.