235 Cultists Perish in Uganda Fire

At least 235 followers of a doomsday cult burned to death in a church fire in a remote part of southwestern Uganda, authorities said Saturday.

It was unclear whether sect leader Joseph Kibweteere died in the fire in the small trading center of Kanungu, 217 miles southwest of Uganda’s capital, Kampala, and near the Congolese border. He had predicted that the world would end Dec. 31, 1999, but changed it to Dec. 31, 2000, after nothing happened, the independent newspaper the Monitor said Sunday.

A police officer, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said preliminary reports indicated that Kibweteere lured his followers inside the church and then set it ablaze.

Police spokesman Asuman Mugenyi said an unspecified number of police officers may have been killed in the fire, which he said took place Thursday. Other police said the church burned Friday.

Witnesses told the Monitor that they smelled gasoline and that there was an explosion that set the church on fire.

“People said they heard some screaming, but it was all over very quickly,” Mugenyi, just back from the scene, said in Mbarara, the provincial capital.

Local leaders said members of the sect, the Movement for the Restoration of Ten Commandments of God, slaughtered their cattle and feasted for a week, drinking a large amount of soft drinks and singing religious songs, according to the Monitor.

As required by law, the sect was registered by the government in 1997. The Monitor quoted Kanungu residents as saying Kibweteere started preaching in 1994 and was a defector from the Roman Catholic Church.

“I think it [the fire] calls on the state to review the issue of cults and see what measures to take to protect the ordinary people from cult leaders,” Amama Mbabazi, minister of state for foreign affairs, told the government-owned Sunday Vision newspaper.

Forensics experts will sift through the remains today, tallying what is believed to be the world’s second biggest mass suicide of recent history.

The corpses, many burned beyond recognition, were left overnight where they were found.

Cult leaders included three excommunicated priests and two excommunicated nuns.

“Prior to this incident, their leader told believers to sell off their possessions and prepare to go to heaven,” Mugenyi said, adding that the police were treating the incident as both suicide and murder because children were involved.

Struggling to contain the spread of cults, the Ugandan authorities asked all religious sects to register their members locally.

There is a history of fanatical religious movements in the country.

In September, police in central Uganda disbanded another doomsday cult, the 1,000-member World Message Last Warning sect. The leaders were charged with rape, kidnapping and illegal confinement.

An extreme and violent Christian cult, the Holy Spirit Movement, sprang up in poor northern Uganda in the late 1980s. Many hundreds of believers died in suicidal attacks, convinced that magic oil would protect them from the bullets of government troops.

Its successor, the Lord’s Resistance Army, is still pursuing a guerrilla war. It claims that it wants to rule the country on the basis of the biblical Ten Commandments, yet it has kidnapped thousands of boys and girls to serve as soldiers and sex slaves, and frequently commits atrocities against local people.

The largest mass suicide of recent times took place in 1978 when a paranoid U.S. pastor, the Rev. Jim Jones, led more than 900 followers to their deaths in Jonestown, Guyana, by drinking a cyanide-laced fruit drink.

Cult members who refused to swallow the liquid were shot. Jones had carved a sign over his altar in Jonestown, reading: “Those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it.”

There have been several smaller group suicides in recent years in Europe and North America, three of them involving the Solar Temple, an international sect that believes that death by ritual suicide leads to rebirth.