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At least 235 dead in Uganda cult suicide

MBARARA. (Uganda): At least 235 cult members, including dozens of children, are believed to have died after setting themselves ablaze in a mass suicide in southwestern Uganda, police said on Saturday.

"There were about 235 registered (cult members) but there are likely to be more killed in the fire - ladies, children and men," police spokesman Assuman Mugenyi told Reuters after visiting the scene of Friday's suicide.

Men and women believers - mostly former Roman Catholics - sold their belongings, donned white, green and black robes and brought their children into the church of the obscure "Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God" in the remote little town of Kanungu.

With doors locked and windows boarded and nailed shut from breakfast time on Friday, they sang and chanted for several hours, then set the church on fire.

"People said they heard some screaming but it was all over very quickly," police spokesman Assuman Mugenyi, just back from the scene, told Reuters in Mbarara, the provincial capital.

Forensic experts will sift through the remains on Sunday, tallying what is believed to be the world's second biggest mass suicide of recent history.

Kanungu, 320 km (200 miles) from the capital Kampala, is tucked down in the southwest corner of Uganda, a country dictator Idi Amin once made a byword for African horrors. Just to the east lies the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where armies of six African states have been sucked into a messy civil war. Just south is Rwanda, where 800,000 people were slaughtered in the 1994 genocide.

STRUGGLE TO CONTAIN CULTS

Local papers said the sect, one of several Doomsday cults to have sprung up in Uganda in recent years, was registered as a non-governmental organisation in 1997, but had been in operation since the early 1990s.

Mugenyi said all 235 registered members of the sect had probably perished in the fire, and probably some unregistered new arrivals as well.

The corpses, many burned beyond recognition, were left overnight where they were found.

Cult leaders, who included former opposition political activist Joseph Kibwetere as well as excommunicated priests Dominic Kataribabo and John Kamagara, taught that the world would end in 2000.

"Prior to this incident their leader told believers to sell off their possessions and prepare to go to heaven," Mugenyi said, adding that the police were treating the incident as both suicide and murder because children were involved.

"Definitely it is both because there were a big number of children who were led there by their parents," he said.

Papers said it was not clear if Kibwetere and other cult leaders had been present at the mass suicide, with the New Vision reporting the self-styled prophet was last seen in hospital in neighbouring Kenya suffering from heart problems. Cult members rarely talked, fearing they might break the commandment "Thou shalt not lie", the papers said. In September, police in central Uganda disbanded another Doomsday cult, the 1,000-member "World Message Last Warning" sect.

The leaders were charged with rape, kidnapping and illegal confinement.

There is a history of fanatical religious movements in the country. An extreme and violent Christian cult, the Holy Spirit Movement, sprang up in poor northern Uganda in the late 1980s.

Many hundreds of believers died in suicidal attacks, convinced that magic oil would protect them from the bullets of government troops.

Its successor, the Lord's Resistance Army, is still pursuing a guerrilla war.

It claims it wants to rule the country on the basis of the Biblical Ten Commandments, yet it has kidnapped thousands of boys and girls to serve as soldiers and sex slaves, and frequently commits atrocities against local people.

The largest mass suicide of recent times took place in 1978 when a paranoid U.S. pastor, the Reverend Jim Jones, led 914 followers to their deaths at Jonestown, Guyana, by drinking a cyanide-laced fruit drink.

Cult members who refused to swallow the liquid were shot. Jones had carved a sign over his altar at Jonestown, reading "Those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it."

In recent years there have been several smaller group suicides in Europe and North America, three of them involving the Solar Temple, an international sect that believes death by ritual suicide leads to rebirth.-Reuters