Tenerife suicide cult followers donated almost two million

dollars Spanish police have found that the alleged leader of a cult who incited her followers to commit mass suicide on the Spanish island of Tenerife earlier this month amassed over 300 million pesetas or almost two million dollars from her followers, Spanish TV reported.

The alleged cult leader, German psychologist Heide Fittkau-Garthe, said from prison that she had never belonged to a sect and that she did not understand what happened on the island.

She said suicide was "a great sin against the love of God and that the existence of life after death was an absolute truth", the television said.

Fittkau-Garthe, who is accused of incitement to suicide and attempted murder, has two houses in Tenerife "and a luxurious home in one of the elite districts of Hamburg," it added.

BBC Monitoring (http://www.monitor.bbc.co.uk), based in Caversham in southern England, selects and translates information from radio, television, press, news agencies and the Internet from 150 countries in more than 70 languages.