EVERYONE agrees that in mid-April the arrest of the leader of an unorthodox religious sect led to bloodshed. But the scale of it is hotly disputed. The official version is that members of the “Light of the World” sect, an offshoot of the Seventh Day Adventists, killed nine unarmed policemen who had come to arrest the sect’s leader, José Kalupeteka, and that in response the security forces killed 13 of his disciples. But Angola’s main opposition party, the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA), says that 1,080 members of the sect were massacred, with helicopter gunships mowing them down.
The area where the incident took place, near the country’s second city of Huambo, which is UNITA’s traditional stronghold south-east of the capital, Luanda, has been cordoned off. Reliable witnesses have yet to emerge. Still less clear is whether the bloodshed could spark a resumption of violence between UNITA and the ruling People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), which has ruled the country since it became independent of Portugal in 1975. Civil war between the rival parties ended in 2002.