The Movement had been founded by Credonia Mwerinde and Joseph Kibweteere in 1989 after Mwerinde and Kibweteere claimed that they had seen visions of the Virgin Mary. The five primary leaders died in a fire and a series of poisonings and killings that were initially considered group suicide.
It was later determined to be a mass murder by the group's leaders after their predictions of the apocalypse failed to come about. BBC News and The New York Times referred to the Movement as a doomsday cult.
In 1978 at least 900 followers of the reverend Jim Jones's People's Temple a US-based cult died at Jonestown, Guyana, in a suspected cult-inspired suicide. Most of those who died drank grape punch laced with cyanide. Those who declined to drink were shot.
In October 1993, 53 hill tribe villagers in a remote Vietnamese village died by suicide using primitive weapons after they were tricked out of money by a local blind leader who had promised to get them to heaven.
A man named Ca Van Liem who declared himself king inspired the mass suicide.
Sacrificial suicide
In October 1994 charred bodies of 48 members of the Solar Temple cult were found in a farmhouse in Switzerland. At the same time, five bodies were discovered in a cottage near Montreal in Canada. The cult, founded in 1980 by Luc Jouret, believed that sacrificial suicide leads to rebirth on a planet called Sirius.
In March 1997, 39 members of a cult going by the name Higher Source committed suicide at a mansion in Santa Fe, California United States. The bodies of 21 women and 18 men were found lying face up and dressed in black trousers and black tennis shoes with purple triangular veils covering their chests and faces.
The 39 it is believed killed themselves by swallowing phenobarbital dissolved in apple sauce and vodka. The sect leader, Marshall Applewhite, also died.
The deaths allegedly coincided with the arrival of the Hale-Bopp comet, which the cult members believed contained a spaceship that would deliver them to a "higher evolutionary level" after they had shed their bodies.
In December 1991 a minister and 29 worshippers suffocated after toxic fumes filled a church in San Luis Potosi, Mexico. The minister, Ramon Morales Almazan, urged people to stay calm and keep praying as they began to choke on the fumes and vomit or faint.