NAIROBI, Kenya (PANA) - Suspected remnants of a Ugandan doomsday cult, the so-called Restoration of the Ten Commandments, have reportedly surfaced in Kenya and pulled a massive following in the Western Province.
The People's Daily, published in Nairobi, Monday reported that a religious group, toting similar beliefs that the doomsday cult conveyed in Uganda, was advising its members to sell their properties and share proceeds with other members.
Quoting a report from human rights groups operating in western Kenya and eastern Uganda, the paper warned in its lead story that the emerging religious group, calling itself 'Choma', could be a reincarnation of the northern Uganda sect that led to mass murder of over 1,000 people in April. Choma is a Kiswahili word for burn.
The daily based its account on a report released in Uganda's eastern town of Mbale on 29 July by Valentiana Moses Oleico of the Uganda Human Rights Group and Western Kenya Human Rights Group executive director, Job Bwonya.
It quoted Oleico as saying that Choma had markedly similar beliefs and practices with the disbanded Kanungu- based sect.
Sect members wear red ties, (Odinga)round caps and white shirts. They prefer black trousers and say the uniforms bind them to the blood of Jesus.
According to the report, the cult members told officials of the two human rights groups that their leader was referred to as The Patron.
Joseph Kibwetere, who is on the run with some of his top aides, led the doomsday cult of Kanungu, northern Uganda. International warrants have been issued for their arrest.
The Choma group leaders teach that riches are earthly and, therefore, the group followers should sell all their property and share proceeds among themselves.
Human rights officials revealed that after three months research, their two organisations established that the cult in Kenya is attracting members daily due to its strange beliefs and practices.
One of its closely guarded secrets is the identity of the sect leader. It is not to be revealed until after 31 December, when sect members believe the world will come to an end.
Government security officials in the Western Province have confirmed receiving a copy of the report from the human rights groups but downplayed its concerns.
Bungoma district police commander, David Kyalo, insisted that Choma was a genuine denomination and not a cult. He said people might have been confused by initiation activities of the Bukusu community, on the Kenyan-Ugandan border, that have picked up and will continue until end of August.
Kyalo, however, urged residents to volunteer information on the alleged cult's activities to the police and promised thorough investigation.
Twenty-two followers of the cult, interviewed by the human rights groups, are said to have confessed living in fear of being led to mass suicide by 31 December.
At least six of them reportedly confessed originating from Uganda though their strict religious code forbid them from being specific on the part of Uganda they came from.
Some of the practices which link Choma to the Ugandan doomsday cult include the claim that 31 December would mark the end of the world, selling all their property and sharing it with cult leaders, and belief that human beings should not toil, go to school or to hospital.
In a press statement released Monday, the two human rights groups have appealed to Kenya's internal security minister, Marsden Madoka, and police commissioner Philemon Abong'o, to "move in and save the people of western Kenya from mass suicide that may be occasioned by the cult".
The cult is said to be active in the western Kenya towns of Bungoma, Kakamega, Mumias, Busia and Webuye with its base in Lugari district.
Human rights groups estimate that the church has a membership of close to 20,000 including children who drop out of school soon after their parents join the sect.
Kampala - Most of the hundreds of the people who died at the hands of a doomsday cult at Kanungu early this year, had been poisoned, police said on Thursday.
"The bodies which were found buried in the pits, had been poisoned, Police pathologists have told us. But we have not got the detailed reports from forensic experts of the type of poisoning because we have not yet paid to get the results. Those that were strangled were few," Police spokesman Asuman Mugenyi told AFP, a French news agency.
The final death toll in the cult killings has now settled at 778, Mugenyi added.
On March 17, about 500 members of the cult lead by Joseph Kibwetere, excommunicated priest Dominic Kataribaabo and a former barmaid, Credonia Mwerinde, burnt to ashes in their church whose doors and windows were nailed shut in Kanungu, Rukungiri district in western Uganda.
It was then believed that petrol, and acid was used in the inferno. The theory of a mass suicide was changed to mass murder when decomposing bodies were discovered in pits with signs of strangulation. Some bodies had stab wounds.
Hundreds of bodies were discovered in various places in the country including Kampala where the doomsday cult had branches.
Earlier reports had suggested that most of the members of the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God had been strangled to death, a theory lent credence by the presence of twists of banana fibre around the necks of many victims.
"There are no more possibilities of any more bodies being found. There is nothing else. We have searched everywhere," Mugenyi told the news agency.
KAMPALA, Uganda, July 27 -- The majority of the hundreds of Ugandans who died at the hands of a doomsday cult this year were poisoned, the police said today.
"The bodies which were found buried in the pits had been poisoned, police pathologists have told us," said a police spokesman, Assuman Mugenyi. "But we have not got the detailed report from forensic experts of the type of poisoning because we have not yet paid to get the results."
Earlier reports suggested that most of the victims -- members of the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God, whose bodies were found in several locations in western Uganda -- had been strangled. That theory had been based on the presence of twists of banana fibers found around the necks of many victims.
But today Mr. Mugenyi said few of the victims had been strangled.
The final death toll in the cult killings has settled at 778, he added.
Earlier estimates given by the government had suggested the figure might exceed 1,000.
Mr. Mugenyi ruled out finding more bodies. "There is nothing else," he said. "We have searched everywhere."
The five principal cult leaders have never been apprehended.
They were believed to have died with their followers in the cult's headquarters in Kanungu, although the police later issued an international warrant for their arrest.
The majority of the hundreds of Ugandans who died at the hands of a doomsday cult earlier this year were poisoned, police said on Thursday.
"The bodies which were found buried in the pits (in several locations in western Uganda) had been poisoned, police pathologists have told us. But we have not got the detailed report from forensic experts of the type of poisoning because we have not yet paid to get the results," said police spokesman Assuman Mugenyi.
Earlier reports had suggested that most of the killed members of the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God had been strangled to death, a theory lent credence by the presence of twists of banana fibre around the necks of many victims.
"Those that were strangled were few," Mugenyi said.
The final death toll in the cult killings has now settled at 778, Mugenyi added.
Earlier estimates given by the government, including Vice President Wandera Specioza Kazibwe, suggested the figure could rise above 1000.
"There are no more possiblities of any more bodies being found.
There is nothing else. We have searched everywhere," Mugenyi added.
The five principal leaders of the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandmants of God cult have never been apprehended.
It was initally believed that they had died along with their followers in the cult's headquarters in Kanungu, although police later issued an international arrest warrant in an effort to bring them to justice.
Kampala - Self-Styled Luweero Wilson Bushara and four hard core followers of his "World Message Last Warning Chuch", were yesterday remanded by Luweero court, over charges of defilement and holding an illegal society.
A total of 22 adults had on Wednesday been transferred to Luweero for prosecution, after being arrested in Iganga on Monday, but only Bushara and four of the followers, appeared in court.
The prosecutor, Mr. James Oringa said the other 17 had been released on Police bond. Those who appeared together with Bushara include: Bishop Mosses Rwakaribata, Bishop Peter Rwetisha, Assistant Bishop Robert Segirinya and Assistant Bishop Josam Kamugisha. Cult leader Bushara was charged with defiling tow under-age girls in addition to the joint charge of holding an illegal assembly which he allegedly committed together with the rest of the group.
Prosecution told court presided over by Grade 2 Magistrate Benson Semondo that Bushara while at Ngoma, Luweero district in 1997, defiled Florence Komugisha, a girl below 18 years.
Bushara was also with defiling Justine Mbabazi while in Maddu, Mpigi district, in 1998.
The self-styled prophet who has been on the run since September last year, was not allowed to take his plea over the defilement charges because the presiding magistrate lacked powers of juridisction.
On the joint charges of holding an illegal society, prosecution told court that Bushara and his 21 followers, (seventeen of whom are not in court) while at Rwoto village, last year, manned or and to man an illegal society, to wit: World Message, Last Warning Church.
Bushara and his four accused who looked weary, were remanded until August 2 at Nakasongola prison.
The rest of the group who did not appear in court include: Geoffrey Nabimenya, Kataratanzi, Stephen Masiko, Tito Bizimungu, Stephen Muhanguzi, George Nankunda, James Kahe, James Rwekibira, Samuel Asiimwe, Jane Kamuheebwa, Geoffrey Kiiza, John Kaheru, Stephen Kazoora, Jackson Mwesigye, Kyokureeba, Benon Karugiye.
They used to serve in various capacities under Bushara's disbanded World Message Last Warning Church.
Kampala - Wilson Bushara, the fugitive "prophet" yesterday pleaded his innocence and maintained that he has not committed any crime but was merely preaching the word of God.
The leader of the World Last Message Warning church was arrested July 18 in Iganga and transported to Kampala yesterday en route to Luwero.
During a brief chat with reporters at Kampala Central Police Station, Bushara, who was speaking in Runyakore, was introduced together with "archbishops" Robert Segirinya,36; Jotham Katake,38; Moses Wakaribata,31; and Peter Rwitsa, 40.
Police said they have been "helpers" of Bushara.
There were six men, eleven women, two 5-year-old children and four babies at CPS yesterday.
Police spokesman, Asuman Mugenyi yesterday confirmed to The Monitor that Bushara and a group of 28 followers with whom he was arrested in Iganga on Tuesday, July 18 were being held.
"In the meantime we are holding them in Kampala because the case is being handled by our Regional CID office," Mugenyi said on phone.
Mugenyi said the state will still prefer charges of defilement and managing an unlawful assembly against Bushara and group.
He also said ACP Chris Bakesima, who is handling the case, will ascertain if any of the 28 followers are on a list police have been keeping in connection with Bushara's sect.
Bushara attracted media attention when he proclaimed that the World would end on June 30, 1999 and convinced his followers to sell off their property and buy places in heaven.
He has been on the run since his sect was dispersed from their camp in Luwero on September 18, last year after police received reports that they were committing crimes ranging from defilement, rape, abduction and theft.
KAMPALA, July 20 (Reuters) - Ugandan police said on Thursday the final death toll from a doomsday cult massacre and mass suicide earlier this year was 780.
Hundreds of members of the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments were burnt alive in a church in Kanungu, western Uganda, in March.
Police believe cult leaders systematically killed another 400 of their followers after a prediction that the world would end at the start of 2000 failed to come true.
``According to police pathologists, 780 people died not only in the church but in the other graves we unearthed around the country,'' police spokesman Assuman Mugenyi told Reuters. He gave no further details, but said they were convinced they had discovered all the graves.
The last grave, in which 55 corpses were discovered, was unearthed at the end of April in a Kampala house previously rented by one of the cult's leaders, ``Father'' Dominic Kataribabo.
Arrest warrants have been issued for six cult leaders, including Kataribabo, although police admit they do not know if they are still alive or perished in the Kanungu blaze.
KAMPALA, Uganda (AP) - Police arrested a cult leader who had been on the run for 10 months after at least 24 decomposed bodies were found buried in his camp, police said Wednesday.
Wilson Bushara, 41, fled in September when police raided his camp in Bokoto, 30 miles north of Kampala, and arrested 1,000 members of his World Message Last Warning cult.
Bushara was arrested Monday with 29 followers in Iganga, 80 miles east of Kampala, police spokesman Asuman Mugenyi said.
Police said they don't believe Bushara's group is linked to the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God, a Ugandan doomsday cult accused in the deaths of 778 members, 330 of whom were burned alive in a March fire at their compound.
Bushara began attracting crowds last year by offering them space in heaven after death in return for cash. Men were supposed to surrender their wives, and the wives declared themselves unmarried.
Mugenyi said Wednesday that Bushara likely will be charged with sexual abuse and managing unlawful assemblies.
Iganga - Wilson Bushara, the 10th most wanted man by the Police, was on Monday night arrested in Iganga town with 29 followers. He told the Police and journalists that he had changed his name to Yosam Kataabe to evade arrest. Followers bought him an MTN-connected mobile phone and he kept in touch with them.
Bushara, 41, a self-styled prophet and leader of the World Message Last Warning cult, went into hiding after the Police stormed his camp at Bukoto, Nakaseke county, Luweero district, on September 18, 1999. Bushara and followers were yesterday detained at the Iganga Police Station. The group comprised his family and a father in-law.
He denied any connection with Joseph Kibwetere, the Kanungu cult leader, who murdered about 1,000 followers on March 17. The Police said Bushara would be transferred to Luweero where they had a camp for prosecution. All the suspects belong to one ethnic group in south- western Uganda.
The healthy-looking Bushara was wearing a light-blue shirt and navy- blue trousers. He said after he was chased from Luweero, he walked some 46km to Hoima where he settled for sometime. He left Hoima when the Kanungu news broke in March. He said he was frightened by the pictures of him and Kibwetere, the Kanungu cult leader Joseph Kibwetere published in The New Vision. He said he shifted to Busia where he and his followers disguised themselves as milk vendors and hotel waitresses. The group left Busia for Iganga in May. The Police said Bushara's cases are recorded as CRB 389/99 and 401/99 in which he is accused of defilement and managing an unlawful society.
The Police have said seven defilement victims ctims have been identified. About 250 heavily armed Policemen evicted about 1,000 of his followers from their camp last year. They had been there eight months.
Bushara fled the camp just before the raid. Over 400 malnourished children were found in the camp, which also accommodated about 500 women, teenagers and 400 men.
Police issued a warrant of arrest against the "prophet" September 24. In Iganga, Bushara, using money contributed by his followers, has been renting three houses at Walugogo, Nabigondo and Nakavule from where they commuted to town trading in milk and ghee. Others were employed in hotels. Bushara taught that the world was ending soon and called on everyone to prepare for Jesus' return. He said one of the boys who used to know him in Luweero recently met him in his hide-out and threatened to report him unless he gave him some huge sums of money. "He also threatened to befriend my girls in hotels or he would report them to the Police.
I believe he is the one who alerted the Police to arrest me," Bushara said. He looked composed.
He said when he got a vision in 1994, he was alerted that his followers would be persecuted.
Police in Uganda say they have arrested the leader of a disbanded religious cult in the south-west of the country.
Wilson Bushara, the leader of the World Message Last Warning Church, escaped when police stormed his camp last year, but was finally caught yesterday Monday.
A police spokeswoman said Mr Bushara and 37 of his followers, who were apprehended with him, will be charged with criminal offences including abduction.
The cult was set up four years ago and told its members to sell their property to buy space in heaven as the end of the world was approaching. The leader of another religious cult in Uganda, Joseph Kibwetere, whose members staged a mass suicide in March, is still at large.
Nairobi: Ugandan police said on Friday that they were questioning a second person over the deaths of some 800 cult followers.
Joseph Ssettuba Ssemande, alias ``The Bishop'', was arrested on Thursday in the southwest, police spokesman John Kimera, said. ``But so far no evidence has been found to link him to the deaths.''
The decision to detain Ssemande was based on family members being followers of the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God cult.
Officers already had in custody an assistant district commissioner for Kanungu, where more than 300 members of the cult died in a church fire on March 17, sparking a search for mass graves. That search has yielded nearly 500 other bodies.
Mutazindwa was alleged to have suppressed a warning about the cult.
Almost every day in southwestern Uganda a new mass grave is found. More than 900 members of the cult Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments have been slain.
Another 4,000 are unaccounted for.
Investigators, overwhelmed by the biggest cult mass murders of recent history, are hard pressed just to complete the grim task of recovering the bodies.
How and why this could happen remains a mystery. What was the motive? How could so many murders have been carried out without raising local suspicions?
``We find it hard to understand,'' said Thaddeus Barungi, the only police pathologist in Uganda, as he watched another body being pulled from a grave. ``Actually we find it impossible to understand how something like this could have happened.''
The saga began two weeks ago when the cult's main ``church'' in Kanungu burned to the ground, killing around 500 people.
Initially treated as mass suicide, police are now positive it was mass murder, with followers lured into the church for a prayer meeting then locked inside as the building burned.
One cult leader ``Father'' Dominic Kataribabo, at whose house 155 corpses would later be discovered, was seen buying 40 litres of stolen concentrated sulphuric acid days before the fire.
Police say four canisters of acid were placed at each corner of the building and mixed with water to create a violent reaction that would precipitate the blaze. Petrol was also sprinkled about the room.
``The intense heat, exemplified by the way the heads exploded and brains liquefied, suggest that it was all over very quickly,'' one senior investigator told reporters. ``Most of them would not have had time to find out what was going on.''
Since last Friday 389 bodies have been pulled out of five mass graves at three of the cult's branches in the country's southwest. Preliminary forensic reports show many were probably strangled. Most of the victims were women and children.
Police have identified overall leader Joseph Kibwetere, who started the cult in 1987, Gredonia Mwerinda, a former barmaid and prostitute and Kataribabo, an excommunicated priest, as among their main suspects. They are believed to be on the run.
While it may never be possible to get into the heads of the fanatical Christian cult leaders who led the brutal killings, police have identified some possible motives.
Kibwetere and Mwerinda, who said they regularly communicated with Jesus and the Virgin Mary, had told followers the world would end on December 31, 1999. When it did not, they may have started killing members who questioned their beliefs and their authority.
There could also have been a financial motive. When people joined the cult they were told to give their possessions to cult leaders, and when Doomsday did not arrive, some apparently began demanding them back.
But how so many people could have been killed is even more difficult to comprehend.
Neighbours at the sites where mass graves have been discovered say they saw nothing. Visitors were discouraged from coming to cult branches and victims were mainly buried in secluded gardens or beneath rooms in buildings. Local authorities suspected something strange was going on, but their reports were either suppressed or ignored.
KANUNGU, Uganda -- Round the clock, two guards patrol the empty cult compound here, but they are not very busy: few people are brave enough to see the place that spawned one of the largest cult killings in history. It looks the same as it did nearly four months ago when 330 bodies, only the first, were found incinerated here. The stench from the pit latrine is still fresh and terrible, so much so that people believe there are many more bodies down there.
"No one knows," said Edison Byamukama, 34, who watches the compound with an automatic rifle. "But there is still bad smelling."
The Ugandan police said they had looked again in the latrine, where six corpses were found in March, but it was empty. The smell remains a mystery, like nearly everything about the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God, which promised the end of the world but delivered only for its 780 victims.
It is a mystery that has been particularly difficult for the people of Kanungu, a rough seven-hour drive southwest of the capital, Kampala.
Few of the dead were from here, mostly because the cult's high priestess, Credonia Mwerinde, was a local girl known better in her youth as a prostitute and banana-beer brewer than a confidante of the Virgin Mary, as she later said she was.
Almost four months after the first bodies were found, shaking this nation still scarred from a past bloody from wars and dictators, hard facts are few. No one knows for certain how so many could die, apparently over several weeks, without the slightest suspicion. No one knows if the group's leaders are dead or alive.
One of the few certainties is that this was not the largest cult killing ever, as was widely reported a few months ago. As new graves were being discovered every few days, the police and government officials said the death toll was over 1,000, and thus more than the 913 who died in Jonestown, Guyana, in 1978. The final toll of 780 -- in six graves in southwestern Uganda and one in the capital -- is still huge. But it is based on an actual body count.
The confusion at the time grew from estimates of how many bodies had been burned in the old church here, with the reports as high as 530. The actual number is 330, said Assuman Mugenyi, a Uganda police spokesman.
Mr. Mugenyi said the police now believed that the leader of the cult, Joseph Kibwetere, a defrocked Roman Catholic priest, was in fact dead and perhaps one of the six bodies pulled from the latrine.
He said their suspicion was based on a few survivors who said Mr. Kibwetere was nowhere to be found in the days before the fire here, on March 17. He said the police also believed that two other cult leaders, Ms. Mwerinde and another defrocked priest, Dominic Kataribabo, might be alive and out of the country. International warrants have been issued for their arrest.
There has been speculation that some went to their deaths willingly. Few of the bodies showed signs of struggle, and some have argued that it strains belief that so many people could have been murdered in these tiny villages without someone knowing. But Mr. Mugenyi said the police were still treating the deaths as murders.
"Although they understood that they were going to heaven, they did not know they would be murdered," he said. "They thought they would get on a bus and go to heaven."
He said it was possible that the victims had been poisoned, although he said the lab reports from quick autopsies on some victims had not been released. One of the few people from Kanungu who was related to someone who died in the fire said he could not believe that anyone had gone along willingly.
Ivan Turyakyira, 36, said his father, Yonathani Kalmasi, 60, had often walked from their hut across a field to study religion or eat at the compound. On May 16 the father went to a feast to celebrate the opening of a new church building there and said nothing about suicide or even about the end being near.
"No one suspected," the son said. Then his father returned the next day and died along with the others in the church fire. Mr. Turyakyira went there when the bodies were heaved into a mass grave but, though he lives a few minutes' walk away, he has stayed away since, like most people.
"It didn't feel good then," he said, "and I didn't want to go back."
Outsiders are beginning to say the town, a pleasant place of green hills and vistas, is haunted.
"We are afraid, because the spirits talk through the night," said Warren Mugabe, 35, a teacher in a village a half-hour's drive south of here. His brother-in-law, Jonnes Mugabe, 36, added, "Some people say they do walk at night and make singing and other things."
This kind of talk angers people from Kanungu, who say it is bad enough that their town is now synonymous with mass murder. "That's a lie," said Matthew Kanyangira, 53, a trader here.
Mr. Byamukama, the guard, said he had never seen or heard anything unearthly.
He should know, because he sleeps in the compound at night.
But still, he considered it. "Some people say the spirits fear this gun," he said. "I don't know if that is so."
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