Some Say Cult Had Replaced Leader : Quebec: Group’s treasurer says new chief died in Switzerland. Members who reportedly joined splinter group were also among victims.

As specialists, friends and associates tried Friday to shed more light on the doomed Swiss-Quebec cult that is somehow mired in more than 50 deaths, the picture only grew murkier.

In fact, the cult’s treasurer insists that Luc Jouret, the supposed chief of the cult now sought by the Swiss police, lost the leadership position seven years ago and took three of its most prominent members--all apparently among the dead found in Switzerland--out of the cult with him a few years later.

This version of events--which contradicts Quebec and Swiss police reports that describe Jouret as the cult’s current leader--was repeated by Roger Giguere, treasurer of the Order of the Solar Temple, to both the Montreal Gazette and a Quebec radio station.

Giguere said Jouret was succeeded as president and grand master of the order by Robert Falardeau, a Quebec civil servant who was one of the victims in the mass murder-suicide in Switzerland.

Giguere acknowledged that Jouret, a Belgian doctor, was an incredibly dynamic speaker. But he said the doctor become too egotistical and too outlandish in his futurist predictions for the taste of most order members.

Jouret then founded another sect, known as ARCHS--the French acronym for the Academy of Research and Knowledge of the High Sciences. He then won the allegiance of temple members such as Mayor Robert Ostiguy of the town of Richelieu, his wife and Quebec journalist Joce-Lyne Grand’Maison. All three died in Switzerland this week.

Giguere’s comments may simply represent an attempt by surviving members of the order in Quebec--estimates of their number vary from 30 to 50--to disassociate the group from Jouret now that he is officially a fugitive. But there is evidence that there had been some kind of split within the order in recent years and that Jouret had a penchant for setting up new, yet interlocking, organizations in both Quebec and Switzerland.

To confuse matters even more, some police believe that the real power behind Jouret was a Swiss businessman named Joseph Di Mambro, who was Jouret’s partner in the ownership of the three buildings that served as cult headquarters.

Government-run Radio Canada reported that Di Mambro may have used the cult as a front for an international arms-smuggling ring.

Radio Canada said Di Mambro sold the arms and laundered millions of dollars in Canadian banks and in the purchase of real estate that he then sold to cult members.

Some kind of financial crisis may have overtaken these organizations recently. Giguere said Falardeau had gone to Europe to straighten out business dealings involving the European branch of the Solar Temple. Falardeau had informed him by phone recently, Giguere said, that the Europeans wanted to depose Falardeau and stop paying dues to the Quebec temple.

Friends and relatives continued to insist Friday that the victims were upstanding citizens who had joined the Solar Temple only because of Jouret’s motivational teachings and their desire for an intense religious experience. Those who knew that their friends had joined the temple did not think of the sect as bizarre in any way.

La Presse, a Montreal newspaper, reported that the journalist Grand’Maison had twice proposed that the editors hire her as their Swiss correspondent. She had traveled often to Switzerland, she told the editors, and had many friends there.

Paul Audsley, her British husband, told Radio Canada he believed she had become less involved with the cult in the last few years, although she continued her close friendship with other members.

“I knew members of the order,” Audsley said. “They were very normal people with many responsibilities. They wanted to do something positive in this world and to go farther than others.”

In Sainte-Anne-de-la-Perade, where the Solar Temple operated an organic farm, neighbor Danielle Auclair told La Presse: “Don’t judge! It’s too easy and, what’s more, they are gentle people who live in harmony with nature, in equilibrium with themselves.”

Auclair said she had worked on the farm and listened to lectures by Jouret but had never joined the sect.

She said Jouret, in the lectures, “offered us a way of living and, as he had so much magnetism and charisma, the things he taught were extremely attractive.”