4 Federal Agents Killed in Shootout With Cult in Texas : Violence: Fifteen officers are injured after they arrive to search armed compound. At least one sect member is dead; several are hurt. Standoff continues into night.

Federal agents attempting to serve search warrants on a heavily armed religious camp near here early Sunday were ambushed by raging gunfire that left four of them dead and 15 others injured, several seriously.

About 45 minutes after the automatic weapons fire began, a cease-fire was negotiated by surviving agents of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and the cult’s leader, a 33-year-old guitarist and ninth-grade dropout who is said to believe that he is Jesus Christ.

Shortly after nightfall, however, gunfire blazed anew as three members of the cult, known as the Branch Davidians, tried to storm an ATF observation post outside the fortified yet primitive religious compound. One cult member was confirmed dead, a second was believed killed and a third was taken into custody, according to officials at ATF headquarters in Washington.

Cult leader David Koresh said in a telephone interview with Cable News Network that a 2-year-old child had been killed in the first confrontation but that could not be confirmed. Several others were injured, including Koresh, who said he had been shot in the abdomen.

Late in the evening, as negotiations between federal officials and the cult leaders continued, four children were released from the compound. ATF spokesman Jack Killorin said the release followed the broadcast of a taped message from Koresh on a Waco radio station. Up to 100 people were believed to remain inside.

Ted Royster, special agent in charge of the ATF’s Dallas office, held back tears as he gave reporters an account of the ambush.

“We had planned this operation for quite a while,” he said. “It appears they knew we were coming. . . . We had our plan down. We had our diversion down, all of which went into effect. They were waiting.”

As night fell, scores of ATF agents still surrounded the 77-acre site, which is about 10 miles east of Waco in Central Texas and serves as headquarters for the cult, which splintered from a group that itself split from the Seventh-day Adventist Church in Los Angeles 60 years ago.

“The people inside are very aware of any outside movement,” Royster said. “They are very jittery of outside movement.”

Koresh defended himself in the CNN telephone interview late Sunday. He also blamed the confrontation on federal agents.

“They fired on us first,” he said. “. . . The bullets started coming into the door, and the young men (inside the compound) started firing on them. I said, ‘There’s women and children here.’ ”

Late Sunday, police officials in the Southern California community of La Verne confirmed that Koresh was the subject of an ongoing child molestation investigation that began in 1991. At the time, Koresh was living in La Verne with 18 women, some of them described as his wives.

La Verne police Sgt. John Hackworth said that the investigation centered on allegations that Koresh was having sex with girls as young as 12. The probe was hampered by the reluctance of cult members to become involved, he said.

“There was difficulty obtaining cooperation from the victims, who had been told that the man molesting them was Christ,” Hackworth said.

All told, Sunday was the bloodiest day in the 21-year history of the ATF, a division of the Treasury Department that enforces laws involving guns, explosives, alcohol, arson and tobacco. About 120 agents of the ATF and its predecessor agencies hav been killed in the line of duty since Prohibition, according to an agency spokesman.

THE FIREFIGHT

The dead and wounded agents were part of a bloc of about 100 that swarmed onto the religious compound about 9:30 a.m. Sunday, preparing to search the property for weapons and explosives and hoping to arrest Koresh.

But witnesses to the fierce battle that followed described an exchange almost unbelievable in its lethal swiftness and overwhelming firepower.

Royster said that the three helicopters and assorted ground assault forces came under fire within minutes of their arrival. Royster himself was in one of the helicopters when it was fired upon from the ground.

Television reporter John McLemore of KWTX, who was there to cover the serving of the search warrants, said the gunfire remained constant from the first shots until the cease-fire 45 minutes later.

Bullets ricocheted everywhere, and fallen agents begged the television crew to call for ambulances, McLemore told CNN. As he retreated to his vehicle, shots pierced it.

“I don’t think anybody could have imagined the kind of artillery inside this compound,” McLemore said. “. . . There were people dropping left and right.”

Two of the agents killed were on a roof and one was on the ground. Royster did not know the location of the fourth dead officer. The assault by those inside the compound came without warning, officials said. The weaponry used was largely automatic and ranged up to .50 caliber, ATF spokesman Killorin said.

After the cease-fire agreement was reached, the less seriously wounded of the agents began pulling out companions who could not move under their own power.

Hospital officials said late Sunday that the condition of the wounded agents ranged from stable to critical, with the injuries including gunshot wounds and broken bones.

THE FORTRESS

Royster described the sect’s grounds as primitive. There was little if any electricity, he said, no running water and no indoor plumbing for the cult members. But there apparently were underground passages.

In a story published Saturday, the Waco Tribune-Herald characterized the cult as heavily armed with high-powered weapons and said they lived at the behest of their eccentric leader.

Included in the arsenal, the newspaper said, were military assault weapons such as AK-47s and AR-15s. Koresh, who formerly went by the name Vernon Howell, told the Associated Press on Saturday that all of the group’s weapons were “regular, legally bought.”

“If the Bible is true, then I’m Christ,” he told the newspaper. “But so what? Look at 2,000 years ago. What’s so great about being Christ? A man nailed to the cross. A man of sorrow acquainted with grief. You know, being Christ ain’t nothing. Know what I mean?”

The newspaper said that it spent eight months probing Koresh and his followers and quoted an Australian private detective who had investigated them for two years as saying Howell abused children and boasted of having sex with underage members.

According to the newspaper, welfare officials twice had visited the cult compound to question children, who told them that there was a bus buried on the grounds to serve as an underground shelter. The officials found no evidence of child abuse.

Royster said that the bureau’s investigation also had begun eight months ago, and the move Sunday was not prompted by the article in the Waco newspaper.

“We had reports from the public and from law enforcement that these people were potential problems,” Royster said. “They were a threat to the public safety of the people of Waco.”

THE CULT

According to Shirley Burton, director of communications for the Seventh-day Adventist church, the sect central to Sunday’s shooting originated in 1929, when a disaffected Bulgarian immigrant named Victor Houteff was dismissed from the church “because of his bizarre beliefs and his lifestyle.” No specifics were available, Burton said.

Dubbing his following the Shepherd’s Rod, Houteff set up shop in Los Angeles but moved to Waco in 1935.

Houteff and his wife, Florence, controlled the group for the next two decades. The next split was precipitated when Florence Houteff predicted that the restoration of the biblical David’s kingdom in Palestine, to which the group aspired, would occur in April of 1959.

When that did not come to pass, most members cast their lot with a Houteff rival, Ben Roden, who called his sect the Branch Davidians.

In 1978, when Roden died, his wife, Lois, took over. Six years later, another split occurred as members were forced to choose between Roden’s son George and another leader, then known as Vernon Howell and today known as David Koresh.

Animosity between the two men flared into a gun battle in 1987. Afterward, seven Koresh partisans were acquitted of attempted murder charges. Koresh’s trial ended in a mistrial, and charges against him were later dismissed.

Officials of the Seventh-day Adventist Church took pains on Sunday to distance themselves from the cult, noting that there was never an official connection between the two groups.

Kennedy reported from Waco and Decker from Los Angeles.