NAIROBI, Kenya — Ugandan officials have placed the final death toll from a Ugandan religious sect’s mass suicide and murder earlier this year at 780, authorities announced July 20.
Hundreds of members of the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God perished in a fire inside their church in southwestern Uganda in March. The group believed the world would end in the year 2000.
Officials initially believed the fire was a mass suicide, but in the weeks following searchers discovered more bodies buried on property associated with the group.
A number of the victims, many of them children, appeared to have been strangled and mutilated, prompting officials to investigate the deaths as murder instead of suicide.
Warrants have been issued for the arrest of six group leaders, though officials are unsure whether the leaders died in the fire or managed to escape.
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