Word: secte
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...continents, mass death in an apocalyptic sect...
...find out whether the deaths were mass suicide, mass murder or some bizarre combination of the two. An international arrest warrant has been issued for Jouret and fellow cult leader Joseph di Mambro, a 70-year-old French Canadian called "the Dictator" or "Napoleon" by some in the sect...
...Morin Heights, 50 miles northwest of Montreal, where five bodies were found. Two were wearing red-and-gold medallions bearing a double-headed eagle and the initials T.S., for Temple Solaire, one name for Jouret's group. Three others -- a Swiss man and his British-born wife, both former sect members, and their three-month-old son -- bore stab wounds...
There was also a motive for murder: money. Bank documents seized by police showed evidence of squabbling within the sect about finances. New members were charged steep initiation fees and required to sign away their assets. The sect / acquired farms and lavish houses in Geneva, southern France and Quebec. A disaffected former follower, Rose Marie Klaus, told a Quebec newspaper last year that she and her husband had given nearly $500,000 to Jouret and never saw it again. Giacobino, the owner of the farm in Cheiry, was heard complaining to friends about Di Mambro's free-spending ways...
...charred bodies of 48 men, women and children -- members of a secretive religious sect known as the Order of the Solar Temple -- were discovered in two Swiss villages, a tragedy that included apparent suicides and what local authorities described as "collective murder" made to appear as mass suicide. In a fire-damaged farmhouse in Cheiry, a village north of Geneva, police discovered 23 dead men and women wearing ceremonial vestments. Fifty miles away, in Granges-sur-Salvan, investigators found 25 additional bodies in three burned-out chalets. Many had bullet wounds indicative of point-blank execution. Almost simultaneously, Canadian authorities...