KANUNGU, Uganda — Ugandan authorities said March 20 the death toll from an apparent mass suicide March 17 in southwestern Uganda by a doomsday sect could reach more than 500 people, the largest such incident since the 1978 Jonestown suicide in which 914 people died.
On March 17 members of the group, the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of god — which predicted the world’s end in the year 2000 — barricaded themselves inside their church in the farming town of Kanungu, then prayed and sang before dousing themselves with gasoline and setting the building on fire.
Questions persist about whether all who died did so willingly. Reports Monday put the number of children who died at 78. Also uncertain is whether the group’s leaders — including several excommunicated Roman Catholic nuns and priests and Joseph Kibweteere, a former member of the Roman Catholic-based Democratic Party — were among those who died in the fire.
Officials denied reports two of the leaders may have escaped the blaze. “We have reason to believe they are in there,” Stephen Okwalinga, regional police commander for southwestern Uganda, told The Washington Post.
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