Ugandan police said yesterday they had found another suspected mass grave linked to a doomsday cult whose leaders apparently murdered more than 900 of their followers.
But police said they would not be digging up any more bodies until they had reinforced their investigative team.
They appealed for international help to carry on their investigations.
The latest grave was found in a cult member's house at Kanungu in south-west Uganda, near the church where about 500 people were burned to death on March 17th.
Police are overwhelmed by the scale of the disaster and their own meagre resources. A police spokesman, Mr Eric Naigambi, said they were suspending exhumations "for a few days".
Instead, they will check sites where they suspect graves are located and guard them until they have worked out how to proceed.
"There will be no more exhumations until we have the logistics in place," Mr Naigambi said. "Now all we are doing is building up statistics".
"We are appealing for the international community to come forward to help . . . if an organisation can help us exhume, examine and preserve the bodies", he said.
The Kanungu 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 Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God in the village of Buhunga.
This week they unearthed a further 155 corpses from the house and garden of the cult leader, "Father" Dominic Kataribabo, in Rugazi, and 81 more bodies from another site in Rushojwa, most of them women and children.
The death toll now rivals the largest cult mass killing of recent times, when a paranoid US pastor, the Rev Jim Jones, led 914 followers to their deaths at Jonestown, Guyana, by drinking a cyanide-laced fruit drink in 1978.
Police suspect the cult's leaders ordered the mass murder after members, who had sold all their belongings and donated the money to the church, began demanding their money back when the world did not end on December 31st, 1999, as had been predicted.
The Ugandan government said yesterday that evidence so far unearthed suggested nearly a thousand people, many of them children, had been murdered at Kanungu and other sites.
It said it would hold an interdenominational prayer service at Kanungu tomorrow, at which the Vice-President, Mr Speciosa Kazibwe, will deliver a message of condolence to relatives and "assure the country action is being taken in pursuit of the criminal perpetrators of the killings".