Mass grave found at home of Doomsday cult leader

Investigators in Uganda have discovered a mass grave hidden in the floor of the home of a defrocked priest and a leader of a doomsday religious sect. They had pulled seven bodies from the grave by late afternoon, but more corpses appeared to remain.

Investigators in Uganda have discovered a mass grave hidden in the floor of the home of a defrocked priest and a leader of a doomsday religious sect. They had pulled seven bodies from the grave by late afternoon, but more corpses appeared to remain.

After interviewing a nephew of Dominic Kataribabo, the former priest who is believed to have died in a fire 10 days ago, police found fresh concrete in a reception room of Kataribabo's 10 room home.

Prisoners on release from a local jail, using a crowbar and a hoe, dug through the concrete and found seven bodies, they pulled the corpses out of the grave with ropes.

On Monday, authorities found the bodies of 73 nameless men, women and children hidden in a sugar cane field at Kataribabo's compound - the third scene of carnage connected to the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God.

Authorities are pursuing the two main leaders of the movement - Cledonia Mwerinde and Joseph Kibweteere, an excommunicated Roman Catholic - in connection with the murders of at least 569 people.

The pair, invoking the authority of Jesus and visions imparted by the Blessed Virgin Mary, predicted the world would end Dec. 31. When the forecast failed, authorities believe, sect members demanded a return of the possessions they had surrendered to join the sect, precipitating the killings.

Senior Ugandan officials have quoted witnesses as saying Mwerinde, 40, and Kibweteere, 68, may have left Kanungu on March 17, the same day a fire in a makeshift sect church there killed at least 330 members. Those reports are unconfirmed.

The deaths in Kanungu - which set off the investigation - were initially viewed as a mass suicide. The discovery of six mutilated and strangled bodies in one of the compound's latrines, however, transformed it into a murder investigation.

Days after the Kanungu fire, 153 bodies were also found buried in a Buhunga village compound belonging to the sect.

Police discovered the Rugazi mass grave on Friday, when they came to inspect the compound that belonged to Kataribabo. The former priest, who is believed to have died in the Kanungu fire, studied for a doctorate in theology in a Los Angeles-area seminary in the mid-1980s said one of his nephews, Bart Bainomukama.

It was after talking to Bainomukama that police began digging in the floor. It was not immediately clear what he told police.

Five other compounds in southwestern Uganda belonging to the sect remained to be examined, said Assuman Mugenyi, Uganda's chief police spokesman.

The sect had up to 1,000 members, and authorities here fear most may have been killed.

On Monday, prisoners released for the day from a local jail worked layer-by-layer through a nightmare of decomposing, mostly naked bodies, pulling the remains - including those of 24 children - from a mass grave hidden in a sugarcane field.

Some of the bodies showed signs of stab wounds while others had pieces of cloth wrapped tightly around their throats. They appeared to have been dead at least a month, said Dr. Ben Twetegire, the local general practitioner examining the corpses. All were in a similar state of decomposition, suggesting they had died at roughly the same time.

The prisoners, shirtless and shoeless, stood head-high in the trench, sweating and digging. They covered their noses in gauze and passed cigarettes among themselves to try to ward off the enveloping stench, which drifted for hundreds of yards across lush hillsides overlooking a chain of steep-banked volcanic lakes.

As the twisted, rotting bodies were hoisted from the reddish brown earth, there were no screams of recognition from villagers who pressed against the crude wood fence at the edge of the cane field. The corpses brought up - sect members who came here to attend seminars on righteous living and the end of the world taught by Kataribabo - were strangers from elsewhere in Uganda.

There were no body bags and only surgical gloves for examination equipment. Onlookers and police plucked the leaves of a nearby cypress tree and thrust them into their nostrils to ease the stench.

The bodies, some dismembered and one visibly pregnant, were cast onto the dirt and examined for little more than a minute by Twetegire, who dictated information to Medal Magdalene, a 30-year-old health worker. Prisoners then picked up the bodies and flung them into a nearby trench for reburial.