74 More Victims of Cult Found in Ugandan Grave

Police here said Monday that they had found the partly decomposed bodies of 74 more people, many of them children, in another mass grave of members of a local doomsday cult.

Officials said that many of the victims had stab wounds, that others had ropes around their necks and that there appeared to be many more bodies buried behind the house of cult leader “Father” Dominic Kataribabo.

The grave included 48 adults and 26 children, bringing to about 700 the number of known victims of the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God, whose leaders had apparently been systematically killing members for months.

Police said they would return today to dig in another part of the compound where they suspected more bodies were buried.

Villagers looked on with twigs from cypress trees pressed to their noses to cover the smell of rotting flesh as a doctor quickly examined the bodies and body parts before they were tossed into another grave.

“Body number 36,” the doctor’s assistant wrote in her notebook. “Decomposed body of child, unidentified, with rope on neck.”

Last week, police found 153 bodies under a building used by the movement near the town of Rukungiri. Many of the people had apparently been clubbed, strangled or hacked to death in recent weeks.

Both finds were less than 50 miles from Kanungu, where about 500 members of the sect died when their church burned down March 17.

Police initially treated the Kanungu fire as a mass suicide, but they now say it appears to have been more the culmination of a systematic policy of killing cult members.

Authorities say some cult members--who had been asked to sell their possessions and give the proceeds to the church--apparently demanded their money back when a prediction that the world would end Dec. 31 failed to come true.

Under pressure to return the money, cult leaders could have begun to kill off unruly followers, police suspect.

Kataribabo and dozens of his followers sold the house at Rugazi and went to Kanungu days before the blaze.

Relatives and neighbors of Kataribabo said they had been aware of digging in the back garden of the house in recent weeks but had not suspected anything unusual.

Police think that Kataribabo, a 64-year-old former Roman Catholic priest, died in the fire at Kanungu.

But they say they think other cult leaders, including self-styled prophet Joseph Kibwetere and his assistant Keredonia Mwerinde are on the run.

Kataribabo was excommunicated by the Catholic Church, but relatives said local people still respected him as a priest.