Date: 25 Mar 1997 00:08:32 -0500
From: Rick Lawler 
Subject: SNET: AUM Cult Fire in Canada Info


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Five Die in Canada in Cult House Fire, 3/23/97
                          
      SAINT CASIMIR, Quebec (Reuter) - Five people found dead in a  
mysterious blaze at a house owned by a doomsday cult appeared to 
have died in a suicide pact, Canadian police said Sunday. 
      Police found the charred bodies of three women and two men  
Saturday night inside the burning house owned by a member of the 
Solar Temple, an international sect whose members believe that 
after death by ritualized suicide, they will be reborn in a 
fictitious place called ``Sirius.'' 
      Three dazed and shivering teenagers, who were apparently  
drugged, emerged from a shed near the burning house in a rural 
village located 37 miles southwest of Quebec City, Quebec. 
      In 1994 and 1995, 69 cult members died in suspicious  
circumstances in grisly fires in Switzerland and Quebec. 
      At a news conference, police said preliminary evidence  
suggests that the victims died in a suicide pact. 
      Lt. Alain Quirion said investigators found two or three  
propane tanks grouped together in the house with two small 
electric hot plates and two containers of fire accelerant that 
may have been gasoline. 
      Police also found letters or documents in the shed that  
indicated the dead were prepared for some sort of ``departure.'' 
The documents appear to point to a suicide pact involving the 
five victims, Quirion said. 
      ``It is a tacit pact. Even if we don't have the word suicide  
anywhere, effectively that seems to be the case,'' Quirion said. 
      Police said the cult was known to place great importance on  
astronomical events, including the spring equinox, which 
occurred Friday, but the documents did not specify a date. 
      Police did not release the names of the victims, but Saint  
Casimir Mayor Louise Douville told Reuters that the house 
belonged to Didier Queze, a 39-year-old Swiss national who had 
been living in the area for three years. 
      Four of the victims were found on a bed on the second floor  
of the house, Quirion said. They included the owner of the house 
and his wife 41, who was Swiss or French, he said. 
      The body of the French 63-year-old mother of the owner's  
wife was found on a sofa on the ground floor with a plastic bag 
covering her head, police said. The other victims found on the 
bed upstairs were a Swiss man, 49, and a Quebec woman, 54, 
police said. 
      Quirion said the bodies found in the bed appeared to be  
arranged in a specific way, each lying perpendicular to the 
other with their feet touching. 
      ``Is it in the form of a cross? Does it have a significance?  
Maybe. That is what we will determine today or this week,'' 
Quirion said. 
      He said the adolescents, a girl aged 14 and two boys, 13 and  
16, were the owner's children. ``The children appeared 
intoxicated by medication or other drugs,'' Quirion said. 
      The teenagers were taken to a local clinic for observation  
and were being counseled by social workers. Police said they 
would be interviewing the children to determine whether they had 
been inside the house or the shed when the fire began. 
      Mayor Douville said Queze lived in the house with his wife  
and three children. He operated a bakery in another nearby 
village, she said. 
      ``I knew he was a member of the Solar Temple, but most  
people around here did not know that,'' Douville said. 
      ``They were good citizens, good taxpayers and we never had  
any trouble with them,'' she said. 
      Police said they were contacting other known Solar Temple  
members in Quebec in connection to the fire. They believe there 
are about 40 Solar Temple members in Canada's French-speaking 
province of 7.3 million people. 
      In 1994, police found the burned bodies of 48 Solar Temple  
members in a farm house and three chalets in Switzerland. At the 
same time in Quebec, five bodies, including that of an infant, 
were found in a chalet in Morin Heights, a picturesque village 
in the Laurentians ski resort area north of Montreal. 
      In December 1995, 16 other Solar Temple members were found  
dead in a burned house outside Grenoble, in the French Alps. Two 
French police officers were among the 16 dead. 
          



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->  Posted by: rlawler@dfw.net (Rick Lawler)