Ugandan police dug 81 bodies from another newly discovered mass grave yesterday, bringing to almost 900 the number of members of a Doomsday cult believed to have been slaughtered by their leaders.
The bodies, nearly all of women and children, and including one pregnant woman, were pulled from a grave in a yard behind a house used by the cult.
Police investigators said the dead people appeared to have been murdered less than a month ago, and at least two bodies still had ropes around their necks showing they may have been strangled.
Police suspect that leaders of the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God systematically killed their followers, after a prediction that the world would end with the second millennium failed to come true.
Around 500 charred bodies were found in the burnt-out remains of a church in the town of Kanungu on March 17th. The fire was originally thought to have been a mass suicide, but in the wake of more grisly discoveries, police are now treating the case as mass murder.
They found 153 bodies last week buried under a house used by the cult in Buhunga, and this week they unearthed another 155 corpses from the house and garden of cult leader, "Father" Dominic Kataribabo, in Rugazi.
Just as at Buhunga and Rugazi, local people said cult members had abandoned the house at Rushowja to go to Kanungu days before the inferno there.
Mr Peter Muhumuza said he returned from Kampala shortly after hearing of the fire at Kanungu only to find his wife and five children had apparently joined the cult and disappeared. "When they left the house I wasn't here - I came back when they had already burned." Authorities said they had arrested a local government official for suspected links with the cult, after President Yoweri Museveni last week ordered an inquiry into reports that local administrators ignored warnings about the cult.
The Internal Affairs Minister, Mr Edward Rugumayo, said police had arrested the Rev Amooti Mutazindwa, an assistant district commissioner, for allegedly suppressing an intelligence report that suggested the cult posed a security threat.
"Some intelligence officers filed reports saying that this is a dangerous group but at one level it was not forwarded, it was just ignored", President Museveni told the BBC.
Discipline could have begun breaking down when Doomsday did not arrive at the end of last year. Some cult members, who had been told to sell their possessions and give the proceeds to the church, appear to have asked for their money back - a demand that may have sealed their fate.
Additional reporting by Paul Busharizi and Gavin Pattison in Kampala