KAMPALA, Uganda — The stench of death permeated the air as gravediggers unearthed the bodies of 55 people — mostly women and children — from a garage rented by a leader of the Ugandan doomsday cult now blamed for 979 deaths.
The bodies of 22 women, 15 men, 10 girls and eight boys were removed Thursday from three graves in the garage attached to a house in Ggaba, a residential area just south of Kampala, police spokesman Assuman Mugenyi said.
The small brick home was one of several rented by an excommunicated Roman Catholic priest, Dominic Kataribabo, a leader of the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments.
Mugenyi said police had suspected for some time that there might be bodies buried on the property. But criticism over the use of unprotected prisoners to unearth remains, coupled with international media coverage, moved authorities to suspend the search until they had assembled the necessary equipment, he said.
Dozens of police and soldiers kept reporters and photographers well away from the property as the bodies were being dug up by municipal workers clad in yellow plastic protective gear.
The bodies bore no external signs of violence, and pathologists will determine the cause of death, Mugenyi said. The remains were wrapped in black polyethylene bags and loaded onto a trailer to be taken to a cemetery for burial.
The exhumations came a month after barefoot prisoners in shorts dug up 80 bodies and a skull from a cult compound in the village of Rushojwa in southwestern Uganda, the last of four properties tied to the cult where bodies were found.
Mugenyi said the digging at the Ggaba compound was finished, and authorities did not expect to find more bodies there. But it was feared that Thursday's grisly discovery would not be the last.
"We have not got the logistics for the whole investigation," Mugenyi told The Associated Press. "This was in the city, and people were concerned, and we were equally concerned, so we had to give it priority. We will wait until everything is ready, and then we will resume the work."
When several hundred people were reported to have perished in a fire at a cult compound in Kanungu on March 17, the deaths were first believed to have been a mass suicide. Authorities later said 530 people were burned alive.
When six bodies were found in a pit latrine in the same compound, and then 388 more in houses owned or rented by cult leaders in three other villages, officials began to speak of mass murder.
On April 6, police issued arrest warrants for Kataribabo, Joseph Kibwetere, Credonia Mwerinde and three other cult leaders. They were initially thought to have perished in the Kanungu fire.
Friends and relatives of the victims said cult leaders encouraged their followers to sell their possessions to prepare for the end of the world that they said would occur Dec. 31. When the end did not come, some members began to ask for their goods back.
Kataribabo, who earned a master's degree in religious studies from Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles in 1987, owned a house in Rugazi village where 155 of the buried bodies were exhumed on March 28 and 29.
Heavy rain last week created a sinkhole near the garage of the Ggaba compound. That raised the suspicions of neighbors and police, neighbors said.
Four women and two teen-age boys who lived in the house vanished three days before the Kanungu fire.
"We got complaints from people about the smell coming from the side of the garage two days after the occupants vanished," said Hamisi Kigozi, a local chief. "We did not suspect much, but people were complaining that there might be bodies there."