Vikram Dodd
November 1978
In the largest cult-inspired mass suicide of recent times, 914 followers of the Reverend Jim Jones’s People’s Temple died at Jonestown, Guyana. Most drank a grape punch that was laced with cyanide. Those who refused to drink it were shot. A sign over Jones’s altar read: “Those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it.”
December 1991
A minister and 29 worshippers suffocated after toxic fumes filled a church in San Luis Potosi, Mexico.
Minister Ramon Morales Almazan urged people to keep praying as they choked on the fumes and vomited or fainted. The minister is reported to have told his dying congregation that God was drawing near.
April 1993
A 51-day siege of a compound run by the Branch Davidian cult, led by David Koresh, at Waco, Texas, ended with the deaths of 70 cult members. A fire consumed the compound, which was surrounded by police and federal agents. Koresh, who believed he was Jesus Christ, died of a shot to the head.
October 1993
Fifty-three hill tribe villagers in a remote Vietnamese hamlet committed suicide using flintlocks and other primitive weapons after they were tricked out of money by a blind local leader who had promised to get them to heaven. The mass suicide was inspired by a man named Ca Van Liem.
October 1994
The charred bodies of 48 members of the Solar Temple cult were found in a farmhouse and three chalets in Switzerland. Five bodies were also discovered in a chalet in Canada. The cult, founded in 1980 by Luc Jouret, believes that sacrificial suicide leads to rebirth on a planet called Sirius.
March 1995
The Aum Shinri Kyo cult killed 12 people and injured 3 700 after releasing sarin nerve gas on the Tokyo subway. The cult, estimated at one time to have 30 000 members, believes it will help lead Japan into a military empire. Its members venerated Shiva, but also took inspiration from Buddhism.
December 1995
Solar Temple members were found dead in a burned house outside Grenoble, in the French Alps. Sixteen corpses were discovered lying in a circle. The victims were killed by two cult members, who were policemen, after first being lured to an outdoor mass.
March 1997
Thirty-nine members of the Higher Source cult committed suicide at a mansion in Santa F, California. The group are believed to have killed themselves by swallowing phenobarbital dissolved in apple sauce and vodka.
Sect leader Marshall Applewhite also died. The deaths were believed to have coincided with the arrival of the Hale- Bopp comet, which cult members believed contained a spaceship that would deliver them to a “higher evolutionary level”.
March 1997
The burned bodies of five Solar Temple members were found in a house in Quebec, Canada.