Warrants Issued for Cult Chief, Aide; Officials Say They May Not Have Died : Switzerland: Police say the two men were seen before several fires erupted. Authorities raid houses, seize documents.

An international arrest warrant was issued Friday for doomsday sect leader Luc Jouret and his chief aide, reflecting investigators’ growing concern that the men may be at large after the mass murder-suicide of 53 of their followers in Switzerland and Canada.

Swiss police said Friday that both men were spotted in this Alpine village the afternoon before fires broke out in three chalets, where 25 of the sect members apparently had been killed by drugs or poison.

“It is possible that Mr. Jouret is among the dead; it is possible he isn’t,” said Beat Karlen, spokesman for the police investigating the deaths of 23 people in a farmhouse in Cheiry, north of here. “We are looking into all possible theories.”

However, investigators are following strong leads that suggest one or more people were present just before the fires at all three locations where bodies were found in Canada and Switzerland. Although police originally called the deaths of the Swiss, French and Canadian cult members a “collective suicide,” they now say they believe some victims were murdered.

And until all the victims have been identified, authorities are operating on the assumption that the leaders may still be alive.

As the probe widened Friday, police in Geneva raided several houses and apartments connected to the group, the Order of the Solar Temple, confiscating financial documents and membership lists.

Swiss police have also detained several sect members for questioning, and others are being sought. None has been arrested, and the arrest warrants for Jouret and his deputy, Joseph Di Mambro, do not mention a charge.

The timing of the fires, and the fact that the gun used in the deaths in Cheiry has not been found, has complicated the case, investigators said.

The first fire, apparently triggered by a timing device, was started late Monday or early Tuesday in a duplex in Canada owned by Di Mambro.

Two of the five victims in Canada were alive when the fires started, autopsies have indicated. The three others, including a 3-month-old baby, were killed before the fire began. On Friday, police classified those three as murder victims. The two adults--a Swiss citizen and his British wife--were discovered Thursday wrapped in a carpet and blankets in the basement of the duplex. The body of the couple’s infant son was found a few hours later wrapped in a plastic bag and hidden behind a water heater in the basement. The child had been stabbed as well.

“The bodies carried wounds made by a hand weapon, probably a knife,” said Michel Brunet, a Quebec provincial police spokesman. He said later the three definitely had been murdered.

The baby’s head was hooded with a plastic garbage bag, similar to those found on some of the cult members in Switzerland.

The couple had been living in a village near the chalet that had served as headquarters for the cult. Their car was found at Montreal’s Mirabel International Airport. Police theorized that the killer probably drove the car to the airport and took a flight out of Canada. That would have given the killer time to take part in the mass suicide and murder in Switzerland.

The next afternoon, Jouret and Di Mambro were seen in the village of Granges-sur-Salvan. Swiss radio quoted the region’s investigating prosecutor as saying the two had sought the aid of a locksmith to enter one of the chalets. The owner of a grocery store near the chalet has said Jouret bought 30 to 40 garbage bags that day.

That night, fire broke out in the sect’s farm house in Cheiry, about a 75-minute drive northwest of Granges-sur-Salvan. Three hours later, the fires began in the three chalets used by the group in Granges-sur-Salvan. Among the reported victims there was Di Mambro’s wife.

Many of the answers to the remaining mysteries, including the timing of the deaths that preceded the fires, depend on the outcome of autopsies being conducted by Dr. Thomas Krompecher, a respected pathologist at the University Center of Legal Medicine in Lausanne.

Krompecher said Friday that he had completed autopsies on 12 of the 48 victims in Switzerland. Although he declined to reveal the causes of death, he said he had seen evidence of an injection in the arm of one victim.

Only five of the bodies have been positively identified. Although the names have not been released, Canadian authorities have named four of them.

Krompecher said neither Jouret nor Di Mambro was among those so far identified. He added that he had yet to receive dental and other records on those two men, which he said will be necessary before any identification could be made.

The bodies of about 14 victims, from the chalets in Granges-sur-Salvan, had been badly burned. Krompecher said it will be days, if not weeks, before autopsies on those bodies can be completed.

Andre Piller, the Swiss prosecutor leading the investigation in Cheiry, said police found cars belonging to three cult members who left the farm shortly before the fires broke out. He declined to say whether the cars were owned by survivors or by people who died later in Granges-sur-Salvan.

Among the mysteries is the whereabouts of the weapon used to shoot 20 of the 23 cult members discovered in the Cheiry farmhouse. (The others probably were suffocated by the plastic bags on their heads, police have said.) Although 52 bullet casings were found, they had not been fired from the three rifles that police discovered.

“There was certainly another person who put several bullets into the heads of these victims,” Piller has said.

In Granges-sur-Salvan, police are still making discoveries in the burned ruins. On Friday, they said they found vials of what appeared to be tranquilizers, hypodermic syringes and intravenous drips. None of the victims in Granges-sur-Salvan, including at least four children, had been shot.

Police said all appeared to have been drugged by a “powerful” substance, still unidentified, that could have killed them. Farewell letters from some of the victims have been found, police said, and a lengthy letter apparently from the group, saying it was “leaving this earth to find a new dimension of truth and absolution,” was sent to a Swiss cult expert.

The authorities also found a Canadian passport and several driver’s licenses, apparently belonging to victims, in cars parked outside the chalets. Police declined to comment on reports that Jouret’s Canadian driver’s license was among those discovered there.

Police in Geneva, where Jouret, a homeopathic doctor, had a practice and led regular meetings of the sect, have sealed off several homes and apartments used by the group.

Swiss newspapers reported Friday that bank documents and other papers confiscated from those houses suggested that the group’s members had argued about finances in recent months.

Times staff writer Stanley Meisler in Montreal contributed to this report.