From: Stig_Agermose@online.pol.dk (Stig Agermose)
Date: Wed, 14 Jan 1998 03:16:22 +0100
Fwd Date: Wed, 14 Jan 1998 05:15:33 -0500
Subject: Members Of German UFO Cult Released

From the Las Vegas Sun. URL:

http://www.lasvegassun.com/sunbin/stories/text/1998/jan/13/011300257.html

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Today: January 13, 1998 at 15:22:05 PST


German Cult Members Released

ASSOCIATED PRESS


SANTA CRUZ DE TENERIFE, Canary Islands (AP) -- Nineteen Germans linked
to a suspected doomsday religious sect were released without charge
Tuesday, a day after being arrested for allegedly planning to take part
in a mass suicide.

The 19, including three children, were taken into custody late Monday
after police searched a house owned by their jailed leader, said Mari
Paz Bernal, a spokeswoman for the Interior Ministry.

The leader, Heide Fittkau-Garthe, was arrested last week and accused of
an earlier plot to lead her 31 followers in a mass suicide. According
to police, the original scheme called for the followers to kill
themselves on Jan. 8 -- the day they reportedly believed the world
would end.

Fittkau-Garthe has denied the claims of a group plot to take their
lives.

The followers, police said, believed a space ship would come and pick
up their bodies at Teide mountain on Tenerife, one of seven islands in
the Canary archipelago, located off the northwest African coast.

Police said they were tipped to a second suicide plan by the mother of
one of the cult members.

Bernal refused to say whether the release of the 19 meant that
authorities no longer believed the second suicide plan existed. Police
said they would continue to monitor the Germans, who were staying in
Fittkau-Garthe's house, but they were free to leave the country.

The other 12 cult members, who were in Germany, were not arrested, she
said.

The sect, whose name was not released, has been linked to the Order of
the Solar Temple, whose followers have carried out mass suicides in
Canada, France and Switzerland.

The attorney for Fittkau-Garthe, a 57-year-old German psychologist
currently charged with attempted murder and inducement to suicide,
insists the allegations are unfounded. Enrique Porres says his client
administers "spiritual therapy" that has nothing to do with mass
suicide.

During their search of Fittkau-Garthe's home, police discovered a
child's drawing of a UFO and then concocted the space ship story, he
says.


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