mixed views as to what happened to Credonia Mwerinde. A few days after the fire police claimed to have found her body, but some people believe that she is still alive. One local business man claims to have discussed selling cult land, vehicles and property just days before the fire. There have also been sightings of her in surrounding countries including the Democratic of the Congo where due to the lack of laws in the country there would be no way of her being faced with any kind of justice or arrest.
S UICIDE OR M URDER?
Straight after the inferno news spread of the mass suicide by the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments, but soon discoveries were made that brought a new question into the equation – was this in fact mass murder?
Four days after the fire, five bodies were found buried under fresh cement in the compound’s latrines. When the people died and who killed them remains a mystery.
On March 25, 2000, 153 further bodies were found under the house of Dominic Kataribabao. The bodies were killed in a variation of ways; hacked, strangled and poisoned. How these murders were carried out without raising any awareness from surrounding neighbours is alarming. Local villagers heard no shouts or screams for help. The only sounds were of the diggers hard at work. When asked what they were doing by local villagers they answered that they were digging new latrines. What it seems like in hind-sight is that the members were digging their own graves.
The mass graves still remain a mystery. Everything is just speculation. The graves are believed to date back to a year or more prior to the blaze. One conclusion for why the graves were there, could be due to the strict categories that the members belonged to. It is possible the lower groups, who did not have fully-fledged members that were ‘willing to die in the arc’, lost their lives here anyway.
G OVERNMENT C OVER-UP / P UZZLE
As well as the theory that Mwerinde and/or Kibwetere had in fact set up and murdered their followers, there is also another belief circulating that the whole thing could have been a government cover-up, with the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments being the scape-goat.
There are so many conflicting news stories reported and written on this case that mass suicide, murders and government/ police cover up are all equally plausible theories.
Newspapers showed pictures of the mass graves that were found in the weeks after the fire. The images showed dead bodies piled up on top of each other. Whereas the police said that these had been added one by one, another source said that the way the bodies were piled looked more as though they were buried all at once, and had been thrown off a dump truck all together.
Another queer event was that a police spokesman had declared that a number of policemen had died in the fire. If this is the case, what were they doing there?
The Ugandan government were also happy to use the tragedy to enforce the restriction of non-mainstream religious groups.
Professor of Religious Studies, Irving Hexham, goes as far as to believe that after the initial number of deaths – which tallied with the number of registered group members – was used as a cover up and stated: ‘Some enterprising police and army officers may have decided to use the tragedy as a cover to dispose of the bodies of murdered political prisoners.’
It could have been easy for this to have happened. It wouldn’t have taken much for the media to start spreading ‘evil-cult’ stories, which would immediately draw the audience in to believe that it was a weird bunch of people brain-washed by the belief of a heavenly after life. People then would get so carried away with that thought process that the government could then start to back it and confirm that this was the truth and no one would even start to think that there could have been conflicting evidence. The media were eager for another story
S UICIDE OR M URDER?
Straight after the inferno news spread of the mass suicide by the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments, but soon discoveries were made that brought a new question into the equation – was this in fact mass murder?
Four days after the fire, five bodies were found buried under fresh cement in the compound’s latrines. When the people died and who killed them remains a mystery.
On March 25, 2000, 153 further bodies were found under the house of Dominic Kataribabao. The bodies were killed in a variation of ways; hacked, strangled and poisoned. How these murders were carried out without raising any awareness from surrounding neighbours is alarming. Local villagers heard no shouts or screams for help. The only sounds were of the diggers hard at work. When asked what they were doing by local villagers they answered that they were digging new latrines. What it seems like in hind-sight is that the members were digging their own graves.
The mass graves still remain a mystery. Everything is just speculation. The graves are believed to date back to a year or more prior to the blaze. One conclusion for why the graves were there, could be due to the strict categories that the members belonged to. It is possible the lower groups, who did not have fully-fledged members that were ‘willing to die in the arc’, lost their lives here anyway.
G OVERNMENT C OVER-UP / P UZZLE
As well as the theory that Mwerinde and/or Kibwetere had in fact set up and murdered their followers, there is also another belief circulating that the whole thing could have been a government cover-up, with the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments being the scape-goat.
There are so many conflicting news stories reported and written on this case that mass suicide, murders and government/ police cover up are all equally plausible theories.
Newspapers showed pictures of the mass graves that were found in the weeks after the fire. The images showed dead bodies piled up on top of each other. Whereas the police said that these had been added one by one, another source said that the way the bodies were piled looked more as though they were buried all at once, and had been thrown off a dump truck all together.
Another queer event was that a police spokesman had declared that a number of policemen had died in the fire. If this is the case, what were they doing there?
The Ugandan government were also happy to use the tragedy to enforce the restriction of non-mainstream religious groups.
Professor of Religious Studies, Irving Hexham, goes as far as to believe that after the initial number of deaths – which tallied with the number of registered group members – was used as a cover up and stated: ‘Some enterprising police and army officers may have decided to use the tragedy as a cover to dispose of the bodies of murdered political prisoners.’
It could have been easy for this to have happened. It wouldn’t have taken much for the media to start spreading ‘evil-cult’ stories, which would immediately draw the audience in to believe that it was a weird bunch of people brain-washed by the belief of a heavenly after life. People then would get so carried away with that thought process that the government could then start to back it and confirm that this was the truth and no one would even start to think that there could have been conflicting evidence. The media were eager for another story
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