On this day in 2000, Uganda witnessed the horrific Kanungu massacre: How a Christian doomsday cult killed more than 700 people
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oday marks 25 years since the gruesome Kanungu cult massacre in Uganda that claimed the lives of more than 700 people. The incident marks the darkest chapter in the history of the East African country whose past is full of many political and social turmoil.
The Kanungu mass murder-suicides
On March 17, 2000, the world woke up to the horrifying news of the mass killings of hundreds of followers of a doomsday cult in a small village in the Kanungu district of Southwestern Uganda. The deceased were members of a cult called the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God (MRTCG). The deaths, which were initially suspected to be mass suicides, were later declared to be mass killings.
On the day of the tragedy, charred bodies of more than 500 people were discovered in a church whose windows and doors were boarded shut with nails. The horror did not stop with a single incident. The Ugandan authorities kept discovering piles of dead bodies in the weeks to follow from different locations.
On March 25, 2000, 153 dead bodies were found buried in one of the cult’s buildings in Buhinga village in the Rukungiri district. This was followed by the discovery of 155 dead bodies below the house of Father Dominic Kataribabo, one of the leaders of the cult, in Rugazi, Bushenyi district, two days later. A couple of days after this, 81 bodies were found in Rushojwa and a month later on April 27, 2000, 55 bodies were discovered in Buziga.
Content retrieved from: https://www.opindia.com/2025/03/kanungu-massacre-in-uganda-christian-doomsday-cult-killed-more-than-700-people/.
