KANUNGU, Uganda (Reuters) - They sold off their possessions, dressed up in their finest white, green and black robes, and after a last party, hundreds of Ugandans boarded themselves into their church to await the end of the world.

They nailed the doors and windows shut and then sang and chanted for hours, before dousing themselves in fuel and setting their church on fire in what is believed to be the world's second biggest mass suicide of recent history.

More than 200 members of the ``Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God,'' some with their children, ended their lives Friday in the belief they were earning a passport to heaven.

``All along they had said that this (the church) is the boat of Noah,'' said Florence, a local villager. ``This is the ark and they were told that at the time of calamity they would come here.''

``They were told that at a certain time this year the world would end and so the leaders made it happen and perhaps the people there believed it had happened,'' she said.

Hundreds of charred corpses still lay in the burned-out shell of the church in the green hills of southwest Uganda on Sunday as rain fell through the collapsed iron roof of the building.

The bodies included the tiny corpses of at least 11 children and probably many more.

Some of the corpses, with their hair and clothes burnt away and their features obliterated, stretched out their arms in what looked like an appeal for help while others lay face down or balanced on their elbows with their heads back.

Still more seemed to be huddling together against the flames. One baby was curled up like a fetus on the ground.

A Reuters correspondent at the scene said there were at least 200 bodies in the church, but local villagers said they believed two or three times that number were living in the compound of which the church was a part and could have all died.

The Ugandan police stuck to an estimate of 235, the number of cult members registered with the local administration, while Ugandan radio, monitored by the BBC, said more than 300 may have died.

A large drum which police believe contained fuel, sat at one end of the church along with the remains of several jerry cans.

``There was a big bang and then another,'' district administrator Kalule Sengo told Reuters at the site. ``It must have been an explosion as a result of fuel.''

Locals said they would probably never know if all the cult members knew what exactly was about to happen, and police said they were treating the case as both suicide and murder because of the involvement of children.

Last Supper

In a nearby dormitory, chicken bones and millet bread bore witness to the last party the cult members enjoyed.

Local officials said the cultists had slaughtered a cow and ordered 70 crates of soda the night before taking their lives.

Kanungu, 200 miles from the capital Kampala, is tucked down in a remote corner of southwestern Uganda, a country dictator Idi Amin once made a byword for African horrors.

Just to the west lies the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where armies of six African states have been sucked into a messy civil war. South is Rwanda, where 800,000 people were slaughtered in the 1994 genocide.

Cult leaders, who included former opposition political activist Joseph Kibwetere as well as two excommunicated priests, taught that the world would end in 2000.

Papers said the cult had been under investigation by local authorities since 1998 for mistreating and possibly kidnapping children, after a primary school they were running with 300 children was closed down.

They said it was not clear if Kibwetere and other cult leaders had been present at the mass suicide, with the New Vision reporting the self-styled prophet was last seen in hospital in neighboring Kenya suffering from heart problems.

In September, police in central Uganda disbanded another Doomsday cult, the 1,000-member ``World Message Last Warning'' sect. The leaders were charged with rape, kidnapping and illegal confinement.

The largest mass suicide of recent times took place in 1978 when a paranoid U.S. pastor, the Reverend Jim Jones, led 914 followers to their deaths at Jonestown, Guyana, by drinking a cyanide-laced fruit drink.