Spanish police foiled plans by 32 members of a doomsday cult to commit mass suicide on Tenerife, police said yesterday. Mr Antonio Lopez, head of the regional police, confirmed in a press statement that, apart from one Spanish woman, all the cult members were German, five of them children.
Mr Lopez said the group - which calls itself the Isis Holistic Centre - could have formed after splitting from the Order of the Solar Temple, a Swiss-based sect known for collective suicides.
Police raided apartments in Santa Cruz de Tenerife on Wednesday and arrested a German psychologist, Ms Heide FittkauGarth (57), who was the suspected leader of the group.
The sect members believed the world would end at 8 p.m. yesterday and planned to kill themselves near the Teide volcano, the highest point of Tenerife island. They thought their bodies would then be picked up by a spaceship.
Journalists had converged on the building which the police raided on Wednesday, in response to rumours that 20 people from the Order of the Solar Temple had killed themselves.
But authorities said no one had committed suicide.
Solar Temple members in Switzerland, France and Canada carried out a number of collective suicides between October 1994 and March 1997.
An expert on sects was quoted in the Spanish newspaper El Pais as saying the Solar Temple had planned - but later cancelled for unknown reasons - a suicide ritual on the islands on June 20th last, the day of the summer solstice.