The Cult Dossier · No. 129 · Apocalyptic / Doomsday
Smaller lethal groups
composite entry
various · worldwide
XII. THE WIDER FIELD — CONCISE ENTRIES
various
Who led it
Multiple; this entry gathers documented lethal incidents too small for individual treatment.
What it worshipped and taught
Varied.
Who was in it
See timeline.
How it ended, or where it stands
Various.
The dead
21 across the incidents listed here (12 in Tijuana, 2 in Penza, 7 in Panama), not counting 052
Of note
Compiled to record that lethal small-group incidents occur regularly and are almost never internationally reported. The named large cases in this dossier are the visible fraction of a much larger phenomenon. CORRECTED SEPTEMBER 2026: earlier versions listed further incidents in Vietnam, Uganda, Argentina, Kenya and France that could not be sourced. They have been removed, not because nothing happened there but because this file could not show that it did.
Its timeline
- 1978, Guyana See Peoples Temple (052).
- 13 DECEMBER 1990, Tijuana, Mexico TWELVE MEMBERS OF A SECT LED BY FEDERICO PADRES MEJÍA, including three children, are found dead in a small house in the El Florido district after a night-long religious ceremony; five more, among them the leader and a baby, are taken to a clinic. Police suspected either a fruit punch tainted with an industrial solvent or a leaking butane tank. It was never established whether the deaths were deliberate.
- NOVEMBER 2007, Penza region, Russia THE PENZA CAVE. Twenty-nine followers of PYOTR KUZNETSOV, including four children, one of them 18 months old, barricade themselves in a hillside cave near Nikolskoye to await an apocalypse he predicted for the spring, threatening to set off stockpiled petrol if removed; later reports put the group at 35. KUZNETSOV DOES NOT GO IN, and is charged with setting up a religious organisation linked to violence.
- MARCH 2008 After rain and a partial collapse, 24 members leave.
- 3 APRIL 2008 Kuznetsov attempts suicide on learning of the departures. He is later diagnosed with schizophrenia.
- APRIL–MAY 2008 Workers shoring up the cave find THE BODIES OF TWO WOMEN. Warned that the fumes could poison them, the last members come out in May.
- 13 JANUARY 2020, Ngäbe-Buglé, Panama THE NEW LIGHT OF GOD MASSACRE. A group summons villagers to its improvised church in a wooden shed; survivors say they were bound and beaten unconscious. SEVEN ARE KILLED — A WOMAN AND SIX CHILDREN — and their bodies are found in a burial pit; fourteen more are tortured.
- 3 DECEMBER 2021 A court in Bocas del Toro gives SEVEN MEMBERS PANAMA'S MAXIMUM SENTENCE OF 50 YEARS and two others 47 years.