Moscow - The final members of a Russian doomsday cult on Friday quit the cave where they had been waiting six months for the end of the world after the stench of rotting corpses threatened them with intoxication, Interfax reported.
Nine survivors emerged from the muddy bunker outside a village in the region of Penza, 560 kilometres (350 miles) southeast of Moscow, the news agency reported.
Interfax quoted local official Vladimir Provotorov saying that they decided to leave because there was "a real threat of poisoning from toxic corpse fumes" of two deceased cult members rotting in the cave.
The sect members were part of an ultra-Orthodox splinter group led by bearded guru Pyotr Kuznetsov, who instructed them to go underground last November in wait for the world's end.
The sect members earlier threatened to blow themselves up with cooking gas canisters if authorities interfered.
Small groups trickled out over the winter and two people died. It was the stench of their corpses that drove out the remaining nine sect members after the remains were exhumed by the emergency services during the early hours of Friday, Penza governor Oleg Melnichenko told Interfax.
