Ugandan death toll surpasses Jonestown's

Less than two weeks after more than 330 members of a religious group burned to death March 17 inside their church in Kanungu in southwestern Uganda, the estimated number of dead church members surpassed the number of persons who died in the Jonestown tragedy. On March 31 Ugandan police revised the number of people believed to have died in the church fire and in a number of nearby compounds to 924.

In 1978, 913 people died by mass suicide and killing at Jim Jones's Peoples Temple in Guyana. Over several days in late March, Ugandan police continued to discover more bodies at the homes of church leaders, including that of excommunicated Roman Catholic priest Dominic Kataribabo, a leader in the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God, which believed that the world would end in the year 2000. Most of the victims found in Kataribabo's compound had been dead for "about a month," according to police official Geoffrey Bangirana.

Searchers discovered more victims buried in Kataribabo's backyard on March 27, three days after unearthing 153 bodies in a church compound in the village of Buhunga. Six bodies were found buried in a latrine at the church compound in Kanungu just four days after the church fire. The rising number of adult and child victims, many of whom appeared to have been strangled and mutilated, has prompted officials to investigate the deaths as murder, not mass suicide as was initially believed.

Police officials say they have positively identified the bodies of two church leaders (including Kataribabo) who died in the fire at Kanungu, but they are not certain whether any other leaders died with their followers. According to reports from several local witnesses, two leaders, Credonia Mwerinde, 40, and former Catholic priest Joseph Kibweteere, 68, left the compound the morning of the fire. Warrants have been issued for their arrest.

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