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Toll of killings by Ugandan cult exceeds 400

By Chris Talbot
28 March 2000

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Latest estimates of the number who died in the church fire at Kanungu, southwest Uganda total over 400. Indications are that the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God church members used explosives to set fire to the building on March 17, in what appears to have been a mass suicide.

President Yoweri Museveni announced a commission of inquiry into the deaths. The police, criticised for burying the bodies in a mass grave before adequate forensic tests could be carried out, are now treating the deaths as murder. Relatives of the dead claim that at least some of the victims had been held against their will.

Investigators have found the bodies of at least 78 children among the charred remains, though the fire was so intense that the exact number killed cannot be determined. The building's windows had been nailed up from the outside and a single eyewitness reports seeing people inside dying in agony.

The bodies of six male adults were found in a pit latrine near to the church, apparently murdered not long before the fire. Other bodies, seemingly dead from natural causes, were discovered buried in the vegetable garden in the church compound.

In the days since the fire excavations have begun at other sites belonging to the sect at Buhunga, 50 kilometres from Kanungu. More than 153 bodies have been exhumed from three sites, according to BBC reports. Many had been strangled or hacked to death, probably at least a month ago.

Cult members are said to have been preparing to die for some time. The sect, which was founded in the late 1980s, preached that the world would end in 2000 and that a new generation would live on an earth where "sorrow and misery are absent".

Church followers were bussed in from other parts of Uganda in the days before the mass deaths, and relatives report that members were selling off their property at low prices, telling them that the Holy Spirit was coming to take them to heaven. They were told that March 17, 2000 would mark the end of the world, and to prepare for that date. The sect held a party a few days prior to the mass killing, roasting an ox and drinking soft drinks.

Whilst one of the heads of the group, a defrocked Roman Catholic priest, is known to have died in the fire, its main leaders, 68-year-old Joseph Kibwetere and so-called prophetess Credonia Mwerinda, were seen by an eyewitness fleeing the church early in the morning before the fire.

Kibwetere was once a wealthy farmer and a leading member of the Roman Catholic-based Democratic Party in the 1960s and '70s. He had to flee his home under the persecution of the Obote regime in 1980. He resurfaced in the late 1980s as the leader of the cult founded by 40-year-old Mwerinda, a former prostitute.

Kibwetere claimed he had overheard a conversation between Jesus Christ and the Virgin Mary, which he recorded on tape. A lady's voice on the tape says that the Ten Commandments must be enforced or the world will end. Kibwetere set up his sect in opposition to the Catholic Church, which he maintained was not strict enough. Members were expected to sell all their possessions and donate the proceeds to the church, which ran a thriving farm for its community of followers and, as a registered charity, raised money throughout the world.

The horrific events in southwest Uganda give expression to a profound social, political and ideological malaise. The post-war history of Uganda, like that of many African nations, witnessed repeated efforts by the masses to overcome the legacy of colonial oppression. Britain granted independence in 1962, but this left Uganda with an underdeveloped economy and wracked by tribalist and religious divisions.

In 1962, Mi