November 21, 1978, Daily Princetonian, Volume 102, Number 123, page 1, World News,

November 21, 1978, Daily Princetonian, Volume 102, Number 123, page 1, World News,

(Compiled by staff members from Associated Press dispatches.) GEORGETOWN, Guyana — Troops swept through a steaming jungle yesterday in search of American religious zealots who fled their remote compound and left behind a scene of horror and death—the bodies of at least 383 fellow cultists, some shot, most apparently poisoned by their own hands in a mass suicide. Among the bodies found at the camp were those of the sect's founder, the Rev. Jim Jones, his wife and one of their children, said Police Chief C. Augustus. Soldiers counted 163 women, 138 men and 32 children among the dead. They all were believed to be Americans. Many reportedly had lined up to take doses of poison from a tub. The mass deaths apparently occurred about an hour or more after members of the California sect, People's Temple, ambushed a visiting investigative group led by Congressman Leo J. Ryan, killing Ryan and four others. The cultists reportedly had long considered mass suicide if they fert their sect threatened. Still unaccounted for were between 500 and 900 of Jones' followers, who fled into the jungle around the agricultural commune, 150 miles northwest of this South American capital.