Church Christ Disciples cult followers repatriated from Ethiopia to Uganda - ministry

News24
June 13, 2023

• Cult members who believed was going to end, have been deported from Ethiopia.
• Church Christ Disciples followers travelled to Ethiopia from Uganda.
• Their pastor told them they would find Jesus after a 40-day fast.

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Ugandan authorities said on Tuesday that 80 followers of a religious cult from the country's east had been deported from Ethiopia where they travelled believing they would find salvation through starving.

The followers of Church Christ Disciples from Soroti travelled to Ethiopia in February after their pastor claimed they would find Jesus there after 40 days of fasting, said a spokesperson for Uganda's internal affairs ministry.

"Working with the Ethiopian government, we were able to process their repatriation and they are all safely in Uganda," said the spokesperson, Simon Mundeyi.

"A joint security and intelligence team has put the religious cult leader, Pastor Simon Opolot, who is a Ugandan, on the wanted list and he will be apprehended."

He said the followers were drawn from across Soroti, a largely rural area, and told to sell all their possessions because the world was coming to an end.

Mundeyi said:

They were fasting for 40 days and on the 41st day is when they were to meet Jesus Christ.

"But Ethiopian officials learnt of their arrival in the country, picked them (up) and confined them until their repatriation documents were ready."

Authorities in Uganda were alerted to the plan by concerned residents in Soroti after the cult followers began leaving for Ethiopia.

In 2000, some 700 members from the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God in Uganda burned to death in one of the world's worst cult-related massacres.

Members of the cult, which believed the world would come to an end at the turn of the millennium, had been locked inside a church, with the doors and windows nailed shut from the outside.

The building in southwestern Uganda's Kanungu district was then set alight.

In neighbouring Kenya, more than 250 people linked to a doomsday cult that also believed in extreme fasting have been exhumed from a forest near the country's coast since April.

Cult leader Paul Nthenge Mackenzie is facing various charges in the grisly case, accused of driving his followers to death by preaching that starvation was the only path to God.

 

https://www.news24.com/news24/africa/news/church-christ-disciples-cult-followers-repatriated-from-ethiopia-to-uganda-ministry-20230613

 

Doomsday cults whose members kill in God’s name

In Summary

Leaders prey on the poor, oppressed and the spiritually weak members under their command. 

Some are children too young to make independent decisions about the ‘shortcut to heaven’.

Cult leaders manipulate and study their targets well before attacking them at their weakest point, mostly to satisfy their own selfish interests.

 

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STELLA CHERONO
JULY 17 2019

Kanungu village in the green hills of southwestern Uganda was unheard-of before the night of March 17, 2000, when some 530 followers were burnt to death in a church, ‘as a shortcut to heaven’.

Inside the church of the doomsday cult – Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God – were bodies of the adherents and their children after the killing that has come to be known as the Kanungu massacre.

SERIAL KILLER

The church’s leaders – Credonia Mwerinde and Joseph Kibweteere – had before the massacre been accused of being behind several mysterious disappearances of both the cult’s followers and their livestock.

After the killings, the Uganda Human Rights Commission, in a periodical report, stated that the initial suspicion was that the massacre was mass suicide by the adherents who were convinced about going to heaven through fire, “but later it was established that it was planned and executed by the cult leadership. The victims of the inferno included children too young to make independent decisions”.

Closer home, just a few years after serial killer Phillip Onyancha confessed that he had killed 17 women and targeted to kill 83 more to hit the 100 target, a city lawyer, Mr Paul Magu, killed his wife and three children before throwing himself in front of a bus heading to Nairobi from Garissa to make his death look like an accident.

The murders of Ms Lydia Magu and her three children – Allen, Ryan and Tiffany – shocked Kenyans as the deranged killer-father managed to stay a step ahead of the police, relatives and neighbours to execute the evil plan.

Although the reason may never be known, detectives – searching for details of what may have led the otherwise bright lawyer to commit the heinous act — said he may have been pushed by a religious cult.

Several other killings have been blamed on religion. Just two days ago, former lawyer-cum-news anchor Esther Arunga confessed before a court in Australia that she had initially lied to police about the circumstances under which her son died on June 18, 2014.

BRAINWASHING

Ms Arunga told the court she lied in order to protect her husband Quincy Timberlake – who is accused of killing the boy – from punishment.

Ms Arunga said on that fateful day, her husband was hitting their son in the stomach, then threw him against the wall, adding that the accused was exorcising demons he believed dwelled in the little boy’s stomach.

“I was terrified of being alone and felt terrible because my husband was sick as well,” Ms Arunga, who is set to be sentenced Thursday, told the court.

Killing in the name of religion is neither new nor exclusive to East Africa.

In 1978, South America’s Jonestown Guyana mass murder and suicide claimed 913 lives.

Sociologists, theologists and religious leaders blame the killings on extreme doctrinal brainwashing.

“Most doctrinal cults target people who are vulnerable to their beliefs. Their prey is usually the poor, the oppressed, the spiritually weak and people who cannot fit in a certain class that they would want to,” Rev Dr Timothy Njoya, a retired minister at the Presbyterian Church of East Africa, told the Nation.

MANIPULATE

He said cult leaders manipulate and study their targets well before attacking them at their weakest point, mostly to satisfy their own selfish interests.

“Some people use religion as a reification tool, in order to create a non-existent world so that they can do things the way they want and create a world they want. This is not necessarily the reality and may not necessarily solve their problems,” Dr Njoya said,

Psychiatrist Lincoln Khasakhala says it is difficult to know exactly what may lead someone to commit homicide or suicide in the name of religion.

“It could be social or psychological factors. We have cases where some people say they were led by a commanding voice to kill. In some cases, schizophrenia plays a role,” Dr Khasakala said.

https://www.nation.co.ke/news/Doomsday-cults-whose-members-kill-in-God-s-name/1056-5198862-5f8t53z/index.html

Uganda: Kibwetere Used HIV Scourge to Lure Victims - New Book Reveals

AllAfrica
30 OCTOBER 2016
The Monitor (Kampala)
By Stephen Wandera

Kampala — A new book that seeks to lift the lid off the mysterious massacre of more than 1,000 people in a church in Kanungu District reveals that Joseph Kibwetere took advantage of the HIV/Aids scourge to lure unsuspecting victims to their doomsday.

The Kanungu Tragedy, authored by Fr Narcisio Bagumisiriza, reveals that the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God, a religious cult, which was accused of the deaths in an inferno in 2000, used the raging Aids pandemic to warn of an end to the world.

Speaking at the launch of the book at Christ the King Church in Kampala on Friday, Fr Bagumisiriza said the whereabouts of Joseph Kibwetere, the mysterious leader of the cult, remain unsolved and it's unclear whether he is dead or alive.

"He took advantage of HIV/Aids that was a big problem in society to justify his argument that it was a punishment from God to sinners as the world came to an end," Fr Bagumisiriza said.

"During my research, I found out that some journals published wrong information insinuating that the Kanungu incident was suicide. The dead were set ablaze by Kibwetere. He had promised his flock that the world would end on December 31, 1999," he added.

A Parliamentary committee that probed the massacre ruled that there was laxity on the part of police because prior to the deaths, there was a complaint by residents that was not followed through by the security agencies.

The report by Parliament's Defence Committee indicated that the police, acting on a complaint from a citizen about dubious activities being carried out by the Joseph Kibwetere group, curiously flagged off the sect as an NGO.

Rattled by how Kibwetere managed to disguise his activities, Prime Minister Ruhakana Rugunda yesterday said the government was forced to amend the NGO Act in the wake of the Kanungu massacres.

"Let us not take things for granted. What happened 16 years ago can still happen today. Let us still play our role of coming together for worship but look at each other. Be vigilant so that masqueraders like Kibwetere are exposed," Dr Rugunda said.

Preliminary investigations by the police at the time indicated that the killings were well planned by the cult leaders after it apparently became clear that the world was not going to come to an end at the turn of millennium. For instance, on March 24, two mass graves containing 153 bodies were found at a cult compound in Kalingo, 45 km to the west of Kanungu. Some had been dead for more than four months.

Ms Adyeeri Omara, the Delight Uganda Ltd chief executive officer, bought the first book at Shs200,000 while Dr Rugunda bought five books at Shs1 million. The official price of the book is Shs25,000.

The background

Cult leaders: Fr Dominic Kataribabo.

According to a March 2000 BBC report, Fr Kataribabo left the US in 1987, after earning a degree in religious studies from Loyola Marymount University, one of America's top Roman Catholic colleges. Fr Kataribabo also had a degree from Makerere University and was rector of Kitabi Seminary where he was known as a good counsellor, the BBC reported.Little is known about Angelina Mugisha, who was also among the cult leaders.

Credonia Mwerinde

Born 1952 in Kanungu at Kateete, Nyabugoto, Mwerinde was the high priestess and co-founder of the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments. She was born in a village where Kibwetere's camp was located. Among the followers of the cult, she was referred to as the 'programmer'. She is reported to have first contacted Kibwetere in 1989.

About the cult: The Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God sprung up in the 1980s after breaking away from the mainstream Roman Catholic Church. The focus of the preaching by the group was that to avoid apocalypse [end of the world], believers had to strictly follow the Ten Commandments. Cult leaders preached that the world would come to an end in the year 2000.

http://allafrica.com/stories/201610300247.html