Cult Members Buried in Mass Grave

Prisoners dug a long trench Monday and a bulldozer shoveled charred corpses into a common grave, the final resting place for hundreds of members of a religious cult led by a former prostitute.

Most of the victims apparently were women, and police counted the bodies of 78 children, the interior minister said. He put the total number of dead at 330.

“These are the ones we could count,” Interior Minister Edward Rugumayo said. “The others are unrecognizable.”

Rugumayo spoke to reporters in Kampala after inspecting the burned hulk of the church hall just outside Kanungu, 215 miles southwest of the Ugandan capital. He said that in addition to the 330 bodies found after Friday’s fire in the church, five bodies were spotted through a hole in a nearby pit latrine.

Rugumayo said police were sure that there were more bodies in the latrine, a walled, communal structure common in African villages, but were awaiting digging equipment to excavate the pit. He did not offer an explanation of how or when the bodies got into the latrine.

Official estimates of the number of deaths have varied from 235 to 600. On Monday, bodies were shoveled into a long trench dug by inmates, but it did not appear that officials were counting victims.

“What emerges out of all this,” Rugumayo said of the sect, “is that the authorities never suspected anything.”

He said the 10-year-old Christian sect, known as the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God, was founded by Cledonia Mwerinde, a former prostitute who had the chapel built on the grave of her father. The sect had about 1,000 members in nine districts in Uganda and was legally registered as a nongovernmental organization.

“We’re going to close down all the branches of this sect and are going to be more vigilant about NGO-registration in the future,” Rugumayo said. “But we can’t stop freedom of worship.”

Police had earlier identified the five primary leaders as the 40-year-old Mwerinde; Joseph Kibweteere, 68, also known as “The Prophet”; and former Roman Catholic priests Dominic Kataribabo, 32, Joseph Kasapurari, 39, and John Kamagara, 69.

Police first said that the five main leaders--including Mwerinde, whom her followers called “the one who has had a vision”--all died. But Rugumayo said later that only two leaders’ bodies had been positively identified--the manager of the sect’s farm and “a priest.”

Gerard Banura, a professor of theology at Kampala’s Makerere University, said the group was an offshoot of the Roman Catholic Church.

“The whole thing centered around worship because these were people who were very uncomfortable with the way worship was being carried out by the church,” he said.