Mass suicide toll may exceed 450

KAMPALA, MARCH. 20. Up to 470 members of an obscure Ugandan cult may have died after setting themselves on fire in a church, police said on Sunday.

Initial examination of the charred remains of the church of the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God showed that many more than the cult's registered 235 members appeared to have died, said Assuman Mugenyi, police spokesman. ``The scene is pure horror. It is only about two or three bodies that you can say are men or women. The rest are beyond shape.''

As investigators began sifting through the debris, police said they would treat the deaths of all those under the age of 18 as possible murders, as they may not all have gone willingly to their deaths. The bodies lay in a tangled mess in the remains of the church in the village of Kanungo, in the remote south-west of Uganda. Police estimated that it could take up to a week to separate and identify the victims. They have sealed off the site after weeping and screaming relatives descended on the church to try to find their loved ones.

It is thought that cult members, whose leaders had predicted the end of the world, set their church on fire after boarding up the doors and windows on the inside. Villagers said that the cult held ceremonies of singing and dancing for several hours before the church was suddenly engulfed in flames. ``People said they heard screaming, but it was all over very quickly,'' Mr. Mugenyi said. Before donning the white, green and black robes they wore to their deaths, many cult followers sold or destroyed their goods, believing that they would be going to heaven.

Cult members had bought supplies of soft drinks, which were thought to have been for a party to be held by Joseph Kibweteere, the sect's leader. Some had travelled around the area saying farewell to their families. They expected a vision of the Virgin Mary to appear and foretell their deaths. Little is known about the cult's precise beliefs or its leader, but it is thought that Kibweteere had predicted that world would end on December 31, 1999 and then changed it to December 31 this year when the prediction did not come true. Last week, he told followers to prepare to go to heaven and led them into the church.

If it is proved that cult members took their own lives, it will be the second largest mass suicide on record, after the 1978 Jonestown horror when 914 followers of the Rev. Jim Jones poisoned themselves in Guyana with a cyanide-laced fruit drink.

Uganda has a violent history of civil war since independence from Britain, which, combined with the despotic rule of the dictator Idi Amin in the 1970s, could explain why cults appear to prosper in the country. Mr. Amama Mbabazi, Foreign Affairs Minister, said the Government would review procedure on cults and try to ``protect ordinary people from cult leaders''. Last September, police raided a compound of the 1,000-member World Message Last Warning Church in Luwero and found seven girls who had been sexually assaulted, three boys being held against their will and 18 unidentified graves.

In November, police raided and disbanded an illegal camp, set up by a self-styled teenage prophetess, who was said to eat nothing but honey. Uganda's most infamous cult is the Lord's Resistance Army, which is fighting a bloody guerilla war in the north. It is notorious for massacres of civilians, abduction of girls to be sex slaves and boys to be child soldiers.

- Telegraph Group Limited, London, 2000.

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Section  : International
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