MOSCOW: Toxic fumes from rotting corpses drove the final members of a Russian doomsday cult from the cave where they had been waiting six months for the end of the world, officials said on Friday.

Eight women and one man emerged from the muddy bunker outside a village in the region of Penza, 560 kilometres (350 miles) southeast of Moscow, said Tatyana Ostrovskaya, a spokeswoman for the local prosecutor's office.

"The last nine people came to the surface after the bodies of two women were found," she told AFP. "We are examining the bodies to see if we will open a criminal case."

Interfax news agency quoted local official Vladimir Provotorov as saying that everyone left because there was "a real threat of poisoning from toxic corpse fumes" from two deceased cult members rotting in the cave.

Those who emerged are in "satisfactory" condition, he said.

The sect members were part of an ultra-Orthodox splinter group led by bearded guru Pyotr Kuznetsov, who instructed them to go underground last November and wait for the world's end.

Kuznetsov waited above ground and was later committed to a psychiatric hospital.

Initially, 35 sect members took refuge underground, threatening to blow themselves up with cooking gas canisters if authorities interfered.

But after surviving the winter, fourteen emerged on April 1, including all four children, when part of their subterranean shelter collapsed in what they took to be a sign from God, but which officials blamed on water from melting snow.

Several others abandoned the cave in the following weeks as conditions in the collapsing shelter gradually worsened.

The rotting corpses were exhumed by the emergency services during the early hours of Friday, Penza governor Oleg Melnichenko told Interfax.

One of the women had died after a strict fast, the other from an unidentified illness, ITAR-TASS quoted a sect leader as saying. The sect members left despite having sufficient reserves of food to stay on, he said.

Many of those who have left the cave continue to await the end of the world at Kuznetsov's wooden cottage in the nearby village of Nikolskoye. Most are from other parts of Russia and from neighbouring Belarus.

The sect members reject the modern world, including the telephone and electricity. They also believe that bar codes giving prices of food products in shops are a symbol of the devil.


- AFP/so