ANNA BORZELLO, Kampala | Monday 1.00pm.
UGANDAN officials said on Monday up to 500 Doomsday cult members died in a fire set deliberately inside their church and police found even more bodies inside the cult’s pit latrine and vegetable garden.
Reacting to the “horrific, senseless and tragic act” Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni said his government will crack down on “dangerous and opportunistic” religious leaders after Friday’s mass suicide.
“From examining the bodies, we estimate there are between 400 and 500 in the church,” said Richard Opira, district public health officer in the remote village where the mass suicide took place at the headquarters of the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God cult.
He said investigators found several pit latrines close to the church that had been covered in fresh cement and, when they opened the first one, discovered more bodies.
“We found five bodies on the surface and when we shone a torch there were more underneath,” he said. “They haven’t been wounded so we think they were strangled or maybe poisoned.”
The grim discoveries, which were expected to reinforce speculation that many of those killed were murdered rather than willing participants, stretched all around the church.
“We are now digging up bodies in the vegetable patch,” Opira said as investigators prepared to uncover the other pit latrines and labourers dug a long pit to bury the cult members.
The members of the obscure sect appeared to have set themselves ablaze on Friday inside the a school dining room that the group used as a church at Kanungu, 320km southwest of the capital Kampala.
After predicting that the world would end on December 31, cult leader Joseph Kibweteere extended the date by a year when the date passed. It was unclear whether Kibweteere died in the fire.
Museveni said his government will ensure that Ugandans are not left at the mercy of what he called “some dangerous and opportunistic individuals who parade themselves as religious leaders,” presidential press secretary Hope Kivengere said. — AFP