Cult watch closed by cash crisis

As dangerous sects multiply before the millennium, the agency monitoring them faces a funding cut, reports Marie Woolf

RELIGIOUS CULTS which threaten mass suicide or violent attacks at the start of the new millennium are to go unmonitored for the first time in a decade because the organisation which keeps track of them is to close.

A funding crisis means that Inform, an academic research body which provides information to the police, governments and people trying to escape from sects, will be forced to shut this year.

The group's plight has alarmed churches and the Government. They fear they will be unable to deal with an upsurge in the number of people joining fringe religious movements before 2000.

A dramatic increase in cult membership is predicted this year as millennial fever grips the western world. Already, a permanent watch around the Millennium Dome has been mounted by police to prevent suicide bids by cult members seeking high-profile deaths.

The Home Office will this month convene a series of emergency meetings between church leaders and politicians to try to save the London School of Economics-based research group. Home Office Ministers plan to ask Gordon Brown to intervene to prevent its closure with an emergency grant but, with huge competition for funds, the chances of success are slim.

"Given the time scale we are obviously keen to progress this process as quickly as possible," said a Home Office spokesman. The research body, whose patron is Dr George Carey, the Archbishop of Canterbury, runs an information line for members of cults and families of cult members. It has files on 1,000 new religious groups and their leaders, including the Order of the Solar Temple responsible for mass suicide pacts in Quebec, France and Switzerland.

The research group has been criticised because it does not take a moral stance on cults nor offer counselling to cult members. It does, however, have a network of contacts in cults and has played a key role in helping governments second-guess the actions of violent sects.

It gave advice about the Japanese Aum Shinrikyo cult which launched a nerve gas attack on the Tokyo subway in 1996 which killed 11 people and injured around 5,500.

Inform currently works closely with Scotland Yard, which has set up a special intelligence cell to monitor cults' activities. The Home Office also has a "cults desk" which briefs ministers on worrying trends.

Police are this week monitoring the leader of an American doomsday cult who lives in London. Members of Concerned Christians, a Colorado-based group, are believed to have plotted to shoot people at religious sites in Israel before the millennium. Members of the cult were arrested last weekend in Jerusalem and face deportation.

As well as watching peaceful groups such as the Scientologists, Inform keeps tabs on controversial cults such as the Branch Davidians, whose leader David Koresh was killed together with 70 followers in a shoot- out after a 51-day siege at Waco, Texas.

Inform was set up in 1988 helped by the Home Office, which contributes pounds 2,000 a year.

"The future is not secure," said a spokesman. "It's very difficult to attract funds. For quite a while we have been telling people of the state we are in and the Home Office is trying to help us find a solution. But ... there is no money and nothing much we can do but close our doors."