Federal agents arrested the leader of a renegade Amish group and six others in eastern Ohio on Wednesday and charged them with hate crimes for a series of beard- and hair-cutting assaults against Amish men and women.

In a case that drew wide attention because of the unusual nature of the attacks, five of the men were arrested last month on kidnapping and other state charges, and were out on bail. At the time of those arrests, officials said that the founder of the breakaway group, Sam Mullet, 66, had not taken part directly in the nighttime assaults against his perceived enemies, and he was not initially charged.

But at 6 a.m. Wednesday, the FBI and local sheriffs raided the splinter settlement near the village of Bergholz, arresting Mullet, three of his sons and three other followers on federal hate crime and conspiracy charges.

The distinctive beards worn by married Amish men, and the uncut hair that married women keep rolled in a bun, are treasured symbols of religious identity, and the attacks appeared designed to inflict humiliation, said Donald B. Kraybill, an expert on the Amish at Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania.

In at least four violent attacks over the last few months, groups of men from Mullet's compound held men down to shear their beards with scissors and battery-operated clippers. In one case, several of Mullet's nephews also hacked off the hair of their own mother — Mullet's sister — who had fled the compound years earlier.

Former residents of Mullet's compound said he exerted iron control over the settlement of 120, many of them his relatives, sometimes imprisoning men in a chicken coop for days or beating them.

Mullet moved with some followers to an isolated valley near Bergholz in 1995 after conflicts with Amish leaders in another part of the state. He fell out with other Amish bishops in eastern Ohio, who determined that his effort to excommunicate eight families that left his compound in 2005 was not justified.

The recent victims included bishops who opposed his excommunication decrees as well as people who aided those who fled from his community.

The federal affidavit provides details of four beard-cutting attacks and notes that the assailants took photographs of the victims, to keep a record of their humiliation. It describes recorded telephone conversations between Mullet and some of those jailed in October, in which they discussed potential further beard-cutting reprisals against their Amish enemies.