MPs start probe into Kibwetere mass killings

Kanungu residents and relatives of the cult victims covering their noses with rosemary twigs as police removed bodies from a pit. PHOTO BY WILLIAM TAYEEBWA.

What you need to know:

The committee plans to hold public hearings to get testimony from victims and other people.

Parliament’s committee on Defence and Internal Affairs has opened investigations into the mass murder of more than 1,000 people in what had initially been suspected as mass suicide in a cult church in Kanungu in 2000. The killings were blamed on the religious cult, the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God-led by the mysterious Joseph Kibwetere and others.

The committee’s investigation followed a petition from locals in Kanungu who complained that the victims had been forgotten by the government. According to Mr Simon Mulongo, MP for Bubulo East and a member of the committee, a recent visit to the former site of the church within Kanungu Town and a stone throw from the district headquarters, revealed that the mass grave is rundown.

Leaders’ fate unknown
The fate of the leaders of the cult is still unknown as no investigation has ever been concluded to determine whether they also died in the inferno or escaped. The cult church was led by a former catholic lay leader, Joseph Kibwetere, together with a former ordained priest, the Rev Fr Joseph Kasapurali.

In the aftermath of the mass killings on March 17 2000, government said the leaders were believed to have survived the inferno and put them on an international wanted list. However, it’s now 13 years later and none has been arrested or been tried in absentia. To the victims, no justice has been delivered.

The committee, sources have intimated to the Saturday Monitor, will seek to establish why a commission of inquiry announced in the aftermath of the tragedy never carried out the work it had been assigned.

It is alleged that the cult leaders, who encouraged followers to sell all their belongings and turn the money over to the church as they prepared for the return of Jesus Christ at the turn of the century, resorted to mass killing the followers after the 1st January 2000 apocalypse prediction failed.