Ethiopian authorities have deported 80 followers of a religious cult who had travelled to the country from Uganda.
The followers of Church Christ Disciples from Soroti in eastern Uganda travelled to Ethiopia in February after their pastor claimed they would find Jesus there after 40 days of fasting, said a spokesman for Uganda's internal affairs ministry.
"Working with the Ethiopian government, we were able to process their repatriation and they are all safe in Uganda," the spokesman, Simon Mundeyi, told AFP news agency.
"A joint security and intelligence team has put the religious cult leader, Pastor Simon Opolot, who is a Ugandan, on the wanted list and he will be apprehended," the official said.
He said the followers were drawn from across Soroti, a largely rural area, and told to sell all their possessions because the world was coming to an end and that they believed they would find salvation through starving.
"They were fasting for 40 days and on the 41st day is when they were to meet Jesus Christ," said Mundeyi.
"But Ethiopian officials learnt of their arrival in the country, picked them (up) and confined them until their repatriation documents were ready.," he added.
Authorities in Uganda were alerted to the plan by concerned residents in Soroti after the cult followers began leaving for Ethiopia.
This is coming as authorities in in neighbouring Kenya continue to exhume bodies of people linked to a doomsday cult that also believed in extreme fasting.
More than 280 bodies have so far been exhumed from a forest in the country's coastal county of Kilifi since the shocking discovery of the deaths in April.
Cult leader Paul Nthenge Mackenzie is facing various charges in the grisly case, accused of driving his followers to death by preaching that starvation was the only path to God.
In 2000, some 700 members from the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God in Uganda burned to death in one of the world's worst cult-related massacres.
Members of the cult, which believed the world would come to an end at the turn of the millennium, had been locked inside a church, with the doors and windows nailed shut from the outside. The building in southwestern Uganda's Kanungu district was then set alight.
