KANUNGA, Uganda (AP) -- In a 163-page handbook distributed across Uganda, a doomsday sect offered a seductive message of heavenly salvation to African villagers struggling with poverty and the scourge of AIDS.
For the unconvinced there was a different fate -- a fiery torment where they would burn for eternity.
The paperbound tract, ``A Timely Message from Heaven: The End of the Present Times,'' was distributed by the thousands; The Associated Press obtained a copy from a man in the southwestern village of Rugazi who said cult members tried unsuccessfully to recruit him.
It offers little but stark choices and homespun advice for righteous living. For hundreds who adhered to its tenets, the reward was ultimately a vicious death.
Authorities say leaders of the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God masterminded the killings of at least 924 followers between late February and mid-March. Police say 530 burned alive inside a chapel at the sect's base in Kanungu; 394 bodies were found buried or hidden at sect compounds.
According to survivors of the movement, sect members demanded the return of possessions they had surrendered to the cult after the world failed to end on Dec. 31, as the leaders had predicted -- a demand said to have triggered the killings.
The 16-part tract -- with a picture of a bleeding, crucified Christ on its cover -- rarely refers to the surrendering of goods, noting only that the movement ``resolves that each person should contribute.''
Instead, it focuses on Uganda's afflictions, casting them as satanic, with obedience to the Ten Commandments the only cure.
AIDS, which has killed hundreds of thousands of Ugandans since the early 1980s, is divine punishment caused by beer-drinking and by perverse sexual practices that ``increase the anger of the Almighty God,'' it says.
All alcohol is ``now under the control of Satan,'' it warns. ``If anyone wants to go to heaven and is drinking he should stop.''
For the unwary, evil lurks everywhere. Herbalists -- called ``witch doctors'' by cult members but relied on by many Ugandans for medical care -- are in the ``company of the devil.''
Even animals aren't spared: ``Cats and dogs are already possessed by the devil. From these animals Satan is actually fighting against man, particularly those who own animals.''
According to the booklet, Ugandans aren't alone in facing judgment. Cities and countries also must repent or face punishment, it says, giving these admonitions:
London? ``Your desire for doing evil will be fulfilled.''
Mexico? ``Heavy arms that are going to destroy five countries will be transported through your roads.''
France? ``Your laziness will not permit you to endure the chastisement that will be inflicted upon you until you are destroyed in lamentations.''
Because their membership drew heavily on Roman Catholics unhappy with, but still loyal to, their church, the writers were eager to stress they were not establishing a new faith.
``Ours is not a religion, but a movement that endeavors to make the people aware of the fact that the Commandments of God have been abandoned, and it gives what should be done for their observance.''
Churches and religious movements come and go frequently in Uganda's roiling religious marketplace as people seek answers to life's questions and relief from its burdens. ``In Kampala, you cannot make two steps without meeting a religion,'' the writers remark.
The booklet also strives to buttress the legitimacy of the sect's leaders. Joseph Kibwetere, Credonia Mwerinde and her sister Angelina Migisha each receive a chapter devoted to the visions they claimed to have received from Jesus and the Virgin Mary.
The visions are used to give divine sanction to the sect's bans on conversation, sex, cosmetics and short skirts, and support for its harsh regimen of fasting, prayer and work.
With the death toll caused by AIDS and the reigns of terror led by former Presidents Idi Amin and Milton Obote, apocalypse is a familiar idiom to Ugandans.
Yet the booklet, last updated in 1996, gives little attention to the sect's end-of-the-world prophecy.
What it does mention is haunting.
``The Lord told me that hurricanes of fire would rain forth from heaven and spread over those who would not have repented...This fire will also reach inside the buildings; there is no way one can escape.''

Excerpts from ``A Timely Message from Heaven: The End of the Present Times'' by leaders of the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God:

--All of you living on the planet, listen to what I'm going to say: When the year 2000 is completed, the year that will follow will not be year 2001. The year that will follow shall be called Year One in a generation that will follow the present generation; the generation that will follow will have few or many people depending on who will repent.
--The Lord told me that hurricanes of fire would rain forth from heaven and spread over all those who would not have repented. They would burn them but would not die immediately. ... This fire will also reach inside the buildings; there is no way one can escape.
--Those who had repented were told to go in hiding to the houses they had built for this purpose. These houses are called 'Ark' or 'Ship.'
--We are definitely taking you to Jesus through the Blessed Virgin Mary, who have (sic) commissioned us, and through the Pope.
--Since the Ten Commandments of God have been abandoned and are being broken, those who go to hell are very many. ...Those going to heaven are few.
--Ours is not a religion but a movement that endeavors to make the people aware of the fact that the Commandments of God have been abandoned, and it gives what should be done for their observance.
--A great number of youths now move about more or less naked. They move about putting on slit-skirts, see-through dresses without any under-clothing. Some move about half-naked putting on back-show dresses. Girls prefer wearing men's trousers to wearing their own dresses. ...All these are symptoms of an urge to violate the Sixth Commandment. Our Blessed Mother Mary says that we, the youths, are like simpletons or fools because of having allowed Satan to dwell in us and make us do all sorts of shameful actions
--AIDS ... is a disaster that has befallen the world. AIDS is a punishment that has been released to the world due to its disobedience. The sole cure is repenting our disobedience, and the restoration of the Ten Commandments of God.''

The Police are investigating reports that the leaders of the doomsday cult responsible for at least 900 deaths, hired hitmen to strangle and bury hundreds of their followers.
A CID officer, part of a team investigating the cult, told The New Vision on Saturday that they had received reports that hitmen were hired from the neighbouring countries of Rwanda and the DR Congo to help in murdering the cult faithfuls.
"Reports by our pathologist that most of the victims died of mechanical strangulation and our findings from accounts by some defectors and survivors indicate that mercenaries might have been hired to do the job," the officer said.
He said some of the people who defected from the cult early this year recalled seeing people who were close to the cult leaders but who did not behave like the other followers.
"One of the witnesses told us that some time in January and February she saw three men whom she had never seen before, at the home of Joseph Nyamurindwa. She said they only spoke Swahili and were not dressed in the cults ceremonial robes," the detective said.

The Rev. Richard Mutazindwa, Rakai Assistant Resident District Commissioner, is still being held by the CID in Kampala, Mr. Erasmus Opio, CID acting Director said yesterday.
Mutazindwa was arrested last week in connection with the burning to death of more than 300 followers of the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God cult in their church at Kanungu, Rukungiri District.
President Yoweri Museveni said Mutazindwa had received information on the impending murder but did not take action to save the victims whose leaders are now believed to have murdered up to 1000 people.
Opio said the Police had not yet preferred charges on Mutazindwa, but, "He is still with us. There are still interrogations going on."
Opio said no other arrests had been done by CID headquarters, The New Vision on March 28 reported Mutazindwa missing. He was said to have left his district for a farewell party in Kanungu and had reportedly told the GISO in Lyantonde, Mr. Kakembo that he had been invited by the cult leaders.
Others reported arrested include one Joseph Settuba alias bishop of Kifamba sub-county in Rakai, who was arrested with Jane Kasande.
They are said to have hosted cult leaders Joseph Kibwetere and Dominic Kataribaabo for a month and moved with them, mobilising residents to register for cult worship.

The Police and other security operatives over the weekend dispersed a cult gathering in Kikandwa, Mubende, on suspicion that wanted Kanungu cult leader Joseph Kibwetere was hiding there.
Kikandwa cult leader Mutume Nabbi Ssali Kilwisa alias Omutaka, fled the security raid on Saturday night, leaving behind 60 followers. Officials found no direct lead to Kibwetere's whereabouts or his ever taking refuge at the fenced one-acre camp.
Security officers, however, recovered a number of exercise books in which Ssali had written "visions and instructions God had given" him.
Ssali's followers believe he heals diseases and has "holy visions." He claims God chose him to "spread the word of ddini eye nnono (traditional religion)" and that "this world" would end on December 31 this year. A new one begins with the same people but new spirits inside them. Kibwetere's Movement for the Restoration of the 10 commandments also preached the world would end soon. Kibwetere and his accomplices murdered at least 1,000 followers, beating the world record by one cult.
The Mityana District Internal Security Officer, Lt. Richard Hashima, said Ssali's camp was known to sometimes hold up to 400 followers at a time.
"We were monitoring Ssali. When we got information that Kibwetere or people connected to Kanungu might be hiding there, we moved in. Ssali appears to be a conman, but we cannot take chances," Hashima said.
By early Sunday afternoon, Ssali was out of hiding, and the 60 followers had left. Kikandwa Police officer Cpl. Adungo Adenyo said two minibuses with 50 followers arrived that morning, but were sent back.
"We were still sending off the original group when new ones poured in. One of them claimed to be a supplies officer from Nasser Road. Most of them came from Kampala and Mpigi," Adungo said.
The followers' register said many faithful came from Mpigi, Nateete, Rubaga, Naguru and Kitintale.
The New Vision spoke to Ssali on Sunday afternoon as two of his six wives sat on the cement floor of the two-room building he occupies at one end of the camp. His wives, children and followers live in low roofed mud-and-reed grass-thatched huts.
Ssali, who speaks only Luganda, said 30 followers lived in the camp permanently, the rest from time to time.
"We send them home; they come back because of pain. I use holy water God gave us in the rocks. There is a cross on the rock to show it is holy. I heal AIDS," he said, pointing at a white 20-litre jerrycan on the verandah.
The Police confiscated books and albums from the camp, one of which contained photographs of five upmarket houses under construction. "We have to check each and every inch of his (25 acres)of land Police said.

KAMPALA, Uganda (AP) - The 530 people whose charred bodies were recovered after a doomsday cult's fiery climax were still alive when their gasoline-soaked chapel exploded in flames, forensics tests showed today.
The doors and windows of the chapel were bolted from the outside, the preliminary investigation findings confirm.
``It was an attack from the inside,'' said A.B.M. Lugudo, deputy commissioner of Uganda's forensics agency.
Investigators have yet to determine if whoever set the fire died with the victims, but their suspicions have been aroused by three, less badly burned corpses found in a separate room of the sect church at Kanungu, Lugudo said.
``We are still looking to see if these people started the fire and tried to run away, but got caught up in the fire,'' he said.
The tests were the first results announced yet in Uganda's investigation of the 924 deaths surrounding the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God.
After the March 17 fire at the church, police found 388 bodies in pits at sect compounds.
Police reported no significant finds during a visit on Monday to a site near Kampala, the capital. It was the fifth site known to be examined by police. Neighbors at the site said it was a home where cult followers had lived more than a year ago.
Uganda suspended digging for any more victims on Friday, stung by press criticism for putting bare-handed jail inmates to work exhuming corpses.
Digging will resume only when authorities have proper protective gear, the government says.
``We will be meeting with police to assess where we are and where the areas of need are before making a formal appeal for international help,'' Edward Rugamya, Internal Affairs minister, told The Associated Press.
The forensics results today disprove reports that the arsonists used sulfuric acid to set the fire, Lugudo said. Only petroleum was found in the ashes.
The government forensics agency will start examining bodies Wednesday, he said.
Police, however, reburied many of the corpses as quickly as they were exhumed.
Uganda has repeatedly complained it lacks proper resources to investigate the deaths, the worst cult tragedy of modern times.
Police reported no significant finds during a search on Monday at a site near Kampala, the capital.

RUGAZI, Uganda (AP) - For days, the stench of rotting human flesh drifted across the playground as police pulled the bodies of 155 sect members from a house on a hill overlooking the town's school.
While decomposed corpses were hauled from the earth and laid out for a pathologist, curious school children stood and watched in disbelief.
To headmaster Frank Rwabambari, the stunned students at his school are themselves victims of the deadliest cult killings in modern history.
Uganda, though, can offer the horrified survivors little help.
``They must have been affected one way or the other. Definitely, some are having nightmares,'' Rwabambari said of the students, who range from 5 to 18 years old. ``But we have no facilities'' for counseling.
Villages in southwestern Uganda have yielded the bodies of 924 victims of the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God.
Of those victims, 530 burned alive in a church fire on March 17, revealing the doomsday sect's apocalyptic agenda to the world and starting a search that would yield mass graves at three other sites.
Authorities believe the failure of the world to end Dec. 31 led sect members to demand belongings they had surrendered to join the cult, and the challenge led to retaliation by sect leaders.
The dead in Rugazi were found stuffed into secret hiding places under the floor of a house owned by a sect leader and buried in a small field behind the structure.
``People are shattered, really shattered,'' said James Walugembe, the Health Ministry's chief for mental health, who was working Monday to put together a crisis team for survivors.
``Something like this has never happened before. We have had war and people killed in combat and we could predict something like that, but this has never happened.''
Uganda, largely rural and poor, has no crisis counselors to rush to schools, workplaces and churches. The nearest psychiatric center to any of the villages is Mbarara, a drive of several hours' away on steep, winding roads that often disintegrate into dirt tracks.
``People need counseling badly, but there is nobody to help them in these areas,'' said Maureen Kahima, a counselor at Mbarara University psychiatric department, whose experts will form part of the crisis team.
Without help, ``something may go wrong,'' Kahima said, warning of psychotic episodes and post-traumatic disorders.
In general, Ugandans tend to hide their grief, said James Kayizzi, a doctor at Rugazi's health center.
In the cult killings, the stigma of association with any member of the Ten Commandments sect means that acquaintances and family members may hold on to their grief that much more tightly.
``People do not want to come out openly because they fear the police and do not want to be identified with the cult ... they are masking their emotion,'' Kayizzi said.
The grieving in southwestern Uganda is for family members, neighbors, and classmates. One of the top students at the Rugazi school died in the church fire.
``He was a wonderful boy, but there was nothing we could do when his mother took him,'' Rwabambari said of 17-year-old Geofrey Kyarimpa.
Handsome, well-behaved and friendly, Kyarimpa was the assistant head boy at the school - a certified school role model, in British-borrowed school terms.
His mother had turned to the Ten Commandments' sect in exasperation atgovernment hospitals' inability to cure the asthma of one of her sons. By December, she had forced Kyarimpa and his three younger brothers from the school.
Last week, Kyarimpa's 15-year-old cousin Lydia Turmamureb was among the blue and white uniformed classmates looking on as searchers scraped bodies from the ground near the schoolyard.
``The smell was terrible, and we saw the bodies,'' Lydia said. ``Some people had stomachaches. Certain people also had nightmares. We are so sad.''

Kampala - Born-again Christians have said the Kanungu massacres in which at least 1,000 cult followers perished, is a deliberate plot to tarnish their name by churches that have lost followers to them. In a meeting of Pentecostal churches, April 03, at Victory Christian Fellowship in Ndeeba, born-again Christians complained that they have been barred from preaching, with people calling them "Kibweteres". Joseph Kibwetere was the leader of The Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God sect which murdered more than 1,000 people in western Uganda recently. Pastor Joseph Serwadda said the doomsday cult leaders were Catholics and not balokole (born-again). "The people in Kanungu were Catholics, but they are being levelled against us. Our history is not based on dead people. The religion which killed people in Kanungu has a history of killing people in its past," Serwadda told a heated up congregation of pastors and believers who kept blaming the deaths on the Roman Catholic Church. He challenged government for referring to unregistered churches as "mainstream", yet born-again churches were the churches registered with government. "The constitution does not attach itself to any religion. So who determines a mainstream or sub-stream church," he said amidst applause.
The meeting which attracted about 400 members resolved to fight government should they try to abolish their faith. "It is a joke, you cannot stop Balokole from existing. If you don't want a child, you stop it in the womb, you don't wait for it to be born," Bishop Grievous Musisi of Prayer Palace said. They were particularly offended by the recent closure and burning down of their churches in Luwero district, following the Kanungu incident.
They gave the Simeon Kayiwa-led National Fellowship for Born-Again Churches mandate to deal with authorities. "If they want to re-investigate the case, no problem. We have always been a police case," Serwadda said.
He recommended that all church certificates be nullified to enable fresh registration through the association. "Let us agree that Balokole have an identifying symbol of BAC (Born-Again Christians) at the end of the label so that the association is liable for all that happens in the churches," he said. Chairman Kayiwa suggested outspoken Bishop Musisi for "Inspector of Churches", to keep cults from registering as born-again congregations.

Kampala - The horrific murders by members of the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God in western Uganda is truly beyond my understanding.
As we speak, the death toll has hit the 1,000 mark. Every day of the previous week brought the sad news of yet another mass grave being discovered containing anything between 40 and 100 bodies. One of the mass graves was under the concrete floor of a bedroom in one of the cult leaders' house. How one can get a night's sleep knowing that 100 people they slaughtered are buried under the floor of one's house is beyond me. While we mourn the deaths of our brothers and sisters, we must ask why Uganda is particularly fertile ground for these deadly cults.
Apart from this group in Kanungu, Joseph Kony and Alice Lakwena led cults which appealed to a population which has failed to find solutions to their every day problems. What is it about the people of Uganda that drives them into the arms of the occult world? President Yoweri Museveni's NRM has been in power for 14 years now.
In this time, Museveni has built a good reputation in the West for being progressive and dynamic.
He has been hailed by Western leaders as the model African statesman.
But the deaths at Kanungu and other events in the recent past point to incontrovertible realities about a people who are desperate, destitute and so hopelessly forlorn. After the terror of Idi Amin and Milton Obote, the Museveni era has not provided Uganda with the peace and stability many had hoped for.
Throughout his 14-year rule, the northern part of Uganda has been burning.
Roving bands of rebels have held sway, cutting off limbs, noses and lips; raping women; abducting school children; destroying property and generally terrorizing the population. As a result, the people of Gulu and Kitgum, as well as much of West Nile, live in constant fear for their lives and thousands of them are internally displaced.
To add insult to injury, Museveni has completely run out of ideas on how to solve the problem of cattle rustling by the Karimojong.
Instead of deploying his once deadly army to neutralize the Karimojong, he adds fuel to the fire by giving the long suffering Iteso guns which, no doubt, they will use both to protect themselves and to steal cattle from each other and their weaker neighbours in Kapchorwa, Pallisa, Tororo and Lira.
While these areas have been in a state for war, their economies have experienced a rapid decline, resulting in extreme poverty.
The situation is no better in Kabarole, Kasese and Bundibugyo where rebels of the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF) and other criminals have terrorized the population for four years now. In Kampala, urban terrorism had become so serious that Western nationals were being advised to keep away from the city's night spots. Museveni's NRM came to power promising a broad-based, all-embracing political arrangement, but as time wore on, all those with divergent views were alienated from the system.
The cancer of corruption is worse than it has ever been. It is hard to comprehend how clear cases of corruption can pass without investigation, let alone prosecution. It seems Museveni has lost perspective. On Museveni's so-called economic miracle, we can only say that not all that glitters is gold.
True, there has been a lot of investment in Uganda and the economy has grown steadily over the years. But the million dollar question is; who is benefiting from this growth? Certainly not the ordinary people who are afflicted with poverty, hunger and disease. Urban crime and prostitution have risen higher then ever before because of the harsh economic conditions. If one is to apportion blame for the cult deaths in south-western Uganda, then much of it goes to President Museveni and his government. The NRM government has failed the aspirations of Ugandans to the extent that they are now running into the open arms of cults promising them wealth and happiness.
The people of Uganda are desperate. Unless their conditions change, we will see more Kanungus.

Kampala - Just outside Kanungu, in the village of Shunga, Eric Mazima, 70, who was once married to cult leader Credonia Mwerinde, is certain his former wife was the brains behind the cult.
He left her 12 years ago, after she tried to convince him that the image of the Virgin Mary was visible on a rock face, and that Mary was speaking to her.
"She must have been in charge because she could convince a lot of people," he said.
"She had a lot of followers. I would never imagine she could be able to kill but after all these crimes, I can believe she was able," said Mazina, who has seen nothing of his wife since the separation. Authorities now believe the leaders of a doomsday cult linked to the deaths of around 1,000 people are still alive, while those who knew them suggest self- enrichment was their motivation.
"I think they are still alive," said Ugandan Vice President Speciosa Kazibwe during a prayer service Sunday in the southwestern town where some 400 members of the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God died in a fire in their church on March 17.
From the testimony of various witnesses, it now appears that Credonia Mwerinde, the cult's so-called "programmer" rather than its "prophet" Joseph Kibwetere, a former mental patient and one-time politician, was the driving force behind the murderous movement.
Mwerinde presented herself as a former prostitute, an unverified detail whose reference to Mary Magdalene would nevertheless not be lost on those familiar with the Bible.
Mwerinde convinced cult members and would-be members that the Virgin Mary regularly appeared to her with messages.
"They exploited illiteracy and ignorance of thousands of people in remote places," said the vice president, who described Kibwetere as "very intelligent" and "mentally ill." Kibwetere and his "12 apostles" recruited numerous local leaders to convince villagers to join the cult, which predicted the end of the world, first in 1992, and then at the turn of the millenium.
One poor woman, Night Nalongo, recalled that Mwerinde sent her away because she could not raise the Shs 250,000 entry fee.
Mwerinde told her there was no room for the poor in the cult.
Ever evoking the Virgin Mary, Mwerinde told would-be members to sell all their possessions and give the proceeds to the sect.
The vast majority of those who died in Kanungu or who were murdered and buried in five mass graves on the grounds of other prominent members in the southwest of the country came from other parts of Uganda and even other nearby countries.
Hundreds of itinerant people, including children without their parents, were housed in transit camps.
It appears that when the world failed to end, leaders planned the murders to avoid the increasing pressure of members' questions and demands for refunds.
A villager in Sweswe explained that on March 10, a week before the Kanungu inferno, Katebalirwe sold her his house for a pittance to raise the fare to travel to Kanungu, where he said he expected to meet Jesus Christ and the Virgin Mary.

RUGAZI, Uganda (AP) -- Sound carries easily from the village to the top of the hill, to the place where an excommunicated priest exhorted his followers to await the apocalypse, and where later two hidden graves disgorged over 150 rotting corpses.
The hilltop compound can be seen from homes, from schools, from the village clinic. A week after the bodies of the cult's devotees were discovered, the choking stench of decaying flesh still fills the air.
Today, everyone in Rugazi knows what happened where the people they called "the visionaries" gathered.
But after hundreds of bodies were found here and at similar spots across the lush hills of southwestern Uganda, the question remains: How could so many people not see what was happening in their midst? It's a question they ask with special urgency in Rugazi.
"How this could happen without anyone else's knowledge?" demanded Deos Bagomba, head catechism teacher at the Roman Catholic church just in front of the compound built by excommunicated parish priest Dominic Kataribabo. "I'm still asking people." There is no simple explanation, but instead a combination of reasons: Cult members and villagers lived side-by-side but were still divided; hundreds of cult followers came and went at odd hours; cult leaders knew how to stop officials from probing too closely.
And there was a silent fear: Maybe, just maybe, the cult leaders had powers that would make it better to steer clear of them.
Everyone here, however, insists they had no idea there were corpses buried at Kataribabo's compound, where followers of the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God often gathered for prayers -- and where 155 of their bodies were discovered.
"We didn't know anything about the killing," said Amos Agaba, a 21-year-old mechanic who lives nearby, and who walked up one day recently to look at the now-abandoned site. "We heard no sounds." The same words are repeated in Buhonga and Rushojwa, two other southwestern villages where mass graves were found. Including a fire at another cult compound, in Kanungu -- a fire that police say killed about 530 people and set off the investigation that led to the discovery of the mass graves -- at least 924 people are believed to have perished in all.
Kataribabo is believed among the dead in the fire.
Others, including the two top leaders, are widely thought to have fled.
More than anything, it was the cult's isolation that kept villagers from discovering the killings.
For years in Rugazi, cult members had lived and prayed at the compound -- sometimes hundreds at a time -- but they had almost no contact with local villagers. To the people of Rugazi, the cult members were strangers who spoke only in the hand gestures demanded by sect leaders.
"There were two different worlds, completely detached," said Stephen Biru, 28, an English teacher at St. Michael's High School.
The cult's actions apparently were dictated by visions of a coming apocalypse, where believers would be carried away on homemade arks and everyone else would perish.
In preparation, the leaders imposed more and more commandments on their flock: no speaking, no sex, little food, minimal contact with outsiders. They sold their possessions and cut contact with relatives. They spent hour after hour in prayer.
At least a couple of times, Ugandan authorities did look into cult activities.
In Rushojwa, site of another mass grave, officials contacted police in connection with a series of sudden deaths among cult children.
Officials arrived, but left after the group showed they were a registered non-governmental organization. The deaths, they were told, were the result of malaria.
In Rugazi, police appeared once during a meeting at Kataribabo's compound. Again, cult leaders produced registration documents, paid a tax to hold the meeting, and the authorities left.
A final explanation for the villagers' ignorance lies deeper, in traditional beliefs and an undercurrent of fear.
In a country where the vast majority of the people believe in the supernatural, the strangeness of the sect and the leaders' control over their followers were unnerving.
"We thought if we'd try to stop them they'd curse us ... Maybe they have spirits," said Tushabe Kizito, bursar at St. Michael's High School.
Sometimes, though, the claims of ignorance strain credulity.
Arsen Oworyanawe, Kataribabo's brother, lives in a small house a few feet away from the mass graves.
Reed mats placed around the graves shielded the carnage from view, says Oworyanawe. Cult members told people the mats were hiding pit toilets.
Stooped by his 78 years and largely deaf, he loudly insists that he had no idea of what was happening.
"I didn't know," he all but shouts. "I didn't know what was happening here."

RUGAZI, Uganda (AP) -- For days, the stench of rotting human flesh drifted across the playground as police pulled the bodies of 155 sect members from a house on a hill overlooking the town's school.
While decomposed corpses were hauled from the earth and laid out for a pathologist, curious schoolchildren stood and watched in disbelief.
To headmaster Frank Rwabambari, the stunned students at his school are themselves victims of the deadliest cult killings in modern history.
Uganda, though, can offer the horrified survivors little help.
"They must have been affected one way or the other. Definitely, some are having nightmares," Rwabambari said of the students, who range from 5 to 18 years old. "But we have no facilities" for counseling.
Villages in southwestern Uganda have yielded the bodies of 924 victims of the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God.
Of those victims, 530 burned alive in a church fire on March 17, revealing the doomsday sect's apocalyptic agenda to the world and starting a search that would yield mass graves at three other sites.
Authorities believe the failure of the world to end Dec. 31 led sect members to demand belongings they had surrendered to join the cult, and the challenge led to retaliation by sect leaders.
The dead in Rugazi were found stuffed into secret hiding places under the floor of a house owned by a sect leader and buried in a small field behind the structure.
"People are shattered, really shattered," said James Walugembe, the Health Ministry's chief for mental health, who was working Monday to put together a crisis team for survivors.
"Something like this has never happened before. We have had war and people killed in combat and we could predict something like that, but this has never happened." Uganda, largely rural and poor, has no crisis counselors to rush to schools, workplaces and churches. The nearest psychiatric center to any of the villages is Mbarara, a drive of several hours' away on steep, winding roads that often disintegrate into dirt tracks.
"People need counseling badly, but there is nobody to help them in these areas," said Maureen Kahima, a counselor at Mbarara University psychiatric department, whose experts will form part of the crisis team.
Without help, "something may go wrong," Kahima said, warning of psychotic episodes and post-traumatic disorders.
The primary school in Rugazi is just a few hundred meters from a compound that belonged to the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God In general, Ugandans tend to hide their grief, said James Kayizzi, a doctor at Rugazi's health center.
In the cult killings, the stigma of association with any member of the Ten Commandments sect means that acquaintances and family members may hold on to their grief that much more tightly.
"People do not want to come out openly because they fear the police and do not want to be identified with the cult ... they are masking their emotion," Kayizzi said.
The grieving in southwestern Uganda is for family members, neighbors, and classmates. One of the top students at the Rugazi school died in the church fire.
"He was a wonderful boy, but there was nothing we could do when his mother took him," Rwabambari said of 17-year-old Geofrey Kyarimpa.
Handsome, well-behaved and friendly, Kyarimpa was the assistant head boy at the school -- a certified school role model, in British-borrowed school terms.
His mother had turned to the Ten Commandments' sect in exasperation at government hospitals' inability to cure the asthma of one of her sons. By December, she had forced Kyarimpa and his three younger brothers from the school.
Last week, Kyarimpa's 15-year-old cousin Lydia Turmamureb was among the blue and white uniformed classmates looking on as searchers scraped bodies from the ground near the schoolyard.
"The smell was terrible, and we saw the bodies," Lydia said. "Some people had stomachaches. Certain people also had nightmares. We are so sad."

MBARARA, Uganda - The Catholic Church is investigating a second cult led by a breakaway bishop amid calls for a crackdown on the religious sects freely operating in Uganda.
"Something must be done about them and must be done now," said Father Peter Paul Ssemakula at his hilltop church, Bukoto St. Jude. "This cannot be allowed to happen ever again, here or anywhere else.
"There is a new cult in our diocese with hundreds of followers, a leader who has left the Catholic Church, has proclaimed himself a bishop and is ordaining priests. Our bishops are already having a very close look at this situation." The situation is familiar to Ugandan police who yesterday were combing the hills in the southwest of the country for more mass graves of victims of a doomsday cult blamed for the deaths of about 1,000 people.
Eric Naigambi, a police spokesman, said investigators were overwhelmed with the process of exhuming bodies from sites used by the cult, but hoped to resume that task soon.
"The problem is that we are overstretched and underbudgeted," Mr. Naigambi said.
"We've halted exhumations for the moment, but we're still looking for suspected sites where we think other bodies might be." Nearly 400 corpses were unearthed last month in several mass graves in southwest Uganda in houses belonging to the leaders of the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God.
Close to 500 cult members were burned alive in a church at Kanungu in the same region on March 17.
Police believe cult leaders had been systematically killing their followers for months after a prediction that the world would end failed to come true.
Ugandan authorities and mainstream churches are urging immediate attention be paid to the other cults after Speciosa Wandira Kazibwe, Uganda's vice-president, announced at a memorial service that more than 1,000 members of the cult had been killed.
"Everyone has got to make sure that the horrible events of the past few weeks are never, ever repeated," Father Ssemakula said. "The mainstream churches and government must play their part but the people themselves must pay more attention to being faithful to the church, obedient to it. Everyone must be more aware. There has been too much fracturing. Too many splinter groups." Mirjam Blaak, director of a company in the capital, Kampala, said: "People say that Uganda has no blame in this. Perhaps not. But perhaps too. There is something wrong when innocent people cannot be protected in a situation like this. There is something fundamentally wrong. That's one of the questions that must be answered."

CESNUR reproduces or quotes documents from the media and different sources on a number of religious issues. Unless otherwise indicated, the opinions expressed are those of the document's author(s), not of CESNUR or its directors.