A Year After Mass Murder, Uganda Cult Leaders Uncaught

KANUNGU, Uganda, March 16 (AP)--The rusting tire rim that served as a bell to summon the faithful swings from the branch of an avocado tree. A tangle of young saplings pushes up from the mass grave.

And the cult leaders presumed to be behind the fire that killed 330 of their followers are still at large one year later.

A ghostly silence hangs over the burned-out hall and the tidy, solid houses where the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God prayed and sang.

They were awaiting the day when God, angered by the world's sins, would send flames to destroy it and take the virtuous to heaven.

But the cult's leaders hastened judgment day and on March 17, according to police, herded 330 people, mostly women and children, into the makeshift mud-and-wattle temple, sprinkled combustible material, nailed the doors and windows shut and torched it.

In the following weeks, police followed a grisly trail to several houses owned or rented by presumed cult leaders, and found 448 more bodies stacked like firewood under concrete floors.

Hundreds of bodies ended up being bulldozed into a mass grave at the site, a converted farm.

Today, people in the hilly corner of southwestern Uganda say the place is haunted by the ghosts of their friends and relatives.

"As dusk approaches, we see figures of people moving up and down as they used to do before they were killed in the fire. They put on the same red and blue uniforms," said 18-year-old Deus Tweyongere, whose aunt and four cousins perished in the inferno.

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