Police Exhumes All Cult Bodies

Grp Movement for the Restoration of the 10 Commandments

Africa News Online, New Vision (Kampala), June 16, 2000

Kampala - Ugandan police have exhumed all the bodies of those murdered by leaders of the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God cult, police spokesman Asuman Mugenyi said Tuesday.

"I think we have now exhausted all those places where these people were buried," Mugenyi told AFP.

On March 17, between 330 and 500 people burnt to death in a fire at their Kanungu cult headquarters in western Uganda.

In the following weeks, police unearthed mass graves containing naked bodies of over 450 mainly women and children at four sites in western Uganda and in the capital Kampala.

Several of the bodies, apparently strangled, had twists of banana fibre around their necks.

Police halted the search for further bodies in April after admitting that they did not have the capacity, equipment or expertise to deal with the scale of the killings.

It was believed, however, that more bodies were buried in other sites accross western Uganda, including a pit latrine inside the cult headquarters at Kanungu, where six mutilated bodies were discovered days after the fire. But Mugenyi told AFP on Tuesday that further investigations had revealed that there were no more bodies in Kanungu.

"I have just talked to the district police commander in that area. There are no more bodies in Kanungu as we had earlier suspected. It is true the place is still smelling, but there aren't any more bodies,"Mugenyi said.