Five members from the "Church of Almighty God" cult were sentenced from three to four years in prison in Hubei Province after secretly producing and transmitting heretic materials, local media reported on Wednesday.

The five were found producing and spreading visual and audio materials after joining the cult between October 2012 and July 2014. Following instructions from "higher authorities," they began to record cult training materials with mobile phones, laptops, mobile hard disk drives and voice recorders in September last year, said a local court in Xinzhou district of Wuhan, the provincial capital of Hubei.

They spread the materials among cult members and others. They also communicated with each other with handwritten notes taken during the training in order to "cultivate dissemination talents" in the district, said the court.

The five were arrested in October 2014 by local police and materials on the cult were found in the seized digital devices, according to Wuhan Evening News.

In October last year, a court in Shandong Province sentenced two members of the cult to death for beating a woman to death at a local McDonald's restaurant.