Cult's Apparent Mass Suicide Stuns The Swiss -- Two Quebec Deaths Also Tied To Leader

ZURICH, Switzerland - In the unlikeliest of locales, two picture-postcard villages tucked away in the Swiss countryside, authorities yesterday were confronted with a jarring and mystifying horror: the apparent mass suicide of 48 members of an apocalyptic cult.

Investigators believe all the dead were disciples of a 46-year-old doctor, Luc Jouret, who heads a Canadian sect known as the Order of the Solar Temple. Two more bodies were found yesterday in a seemingly related incident in a small town in Quebec.

Jouret fled to Switzerland last year after pleading guilty to illegal-weapons charges in Canada, and it was not known whether he was among the dead.

Quebec provincial police said today four of the victims found in Switzerland were from Quebec, including a small-town mayor and his wife, a journalist and a provincial bureacrat. All four are linked with the Order of the Solar Temple.

Quebec police spokesman Michel Brunet said the dead were Robert Ostiguy, 50, mayor of Richelieu, a small town just east of Montreal; his wife, Francoise, 46; Joce-Lyne Grand'Maison, 44, a journalist from Quebec City; and Robert Falardeau, 47, a bureaucrat in Quebec's Finance Department.

The grisly discoveries began early yesterday in Cheiry, a village about 45 miles northeast of Geneva. Volunteer firefighters returning from the opening of a new pizzeria saw a burning farmhouse and investigated.

After extinguishing the flames, they saw a trail of blood that led to a secret doorway. Inside, they found a red, mirror-lined chapel in the basement where 23 corpses lay side-by-side, tied together in a circle.

Shot in the head

Most had been shot in the head. Some had plastic bags tied tightly around their heads with rubber bands and string. The men wore ceremonial red-and-black robes, the women long golden gowns. Empty champagne bottles were littered about.

"It looked like they had been celebrating," a firefighter told the Swiss news agency.

Less than an hour later and 100 miles away, firefighters came across a similar scene in another Alpine village, Granges-Sur-Salvan, near the Italian border. There, they pulled 25 corpses, including some of children, from two smoldering chalets.

Death toll expected to rise

The death toll is expected to rise todayas police search a third chalet in Granges. They were reluctant to search yesterday because of fears that the building might be booby-trapped with an incendiary device.

Charred passports found in both villages identified the dead as Swiss, Canadian and French.

Real-estate records clearly linked the deaths in Switzerland and Quebec to Jouret. He was listed as owner of two of the three burned chalets in Granges and of the house in Morin Heights, in Quebec, where the other two bodies were found.

The farmhouse in Cheiry was registered as an agricultural research facility - and village residents said they thought the occupants were simply new-age adherents experimenting with organic gardening.

The farmhouse had been purchased in November 1990 for $1.8 million by Alberto Giacobino. The Geneva resident, in his 70s, was one of those found dead yesterday.

Police said that the dead in Cheiry ranged from the age of 10 to 80.

In all the locations, homemade bombs and canisters of gasoline were discovered. The devices were rigged to go off by themselves.

In Cheiry, one bomb was attached to the telephone so that "if a phone call came in, everything would go flying in the air," a fireman was quoted as saying.

Whatever happened, someone meant to hide the evidence by burning the bodies. But two elaborate bombs failed to explode, possibly because the phone system was out of service most of the day.

In both chalets searched in Granges, the dead were lying peacefully in their beds. There was no sign of violence.

Stunned residents of Cheiry with television cameras thrust in their faces all pretty much uttered the same words: "How could this happen here? It has always been so quiet."

One elderly farmer had his own answer.

"This was plainly the work of the devil," he said. Information from Associated Press and Reuters is included in this report.