Cambridge, Mass. (CNN) -- Three Harvard College students committed suicide this morning in a bizarre ritual that has shocked the prestigious university. While Cambridge Police are releasing few details, the students appear to have committed suicide in a traditional Japanese way, known as seppuku, according to one eyewitness interviewed later. The students, whose names are being withheld pending the notification of their families, wore traditional Japanese robes and stabbed themselves in the stomach with long knives while three other men decapitated them with Japanese swords.
A detective in the Cambridge police department who asked not to be named so that he could speak more freely said that a suicide note had been found, and that police were still investigating its meaning. "[The suicide note] states that the suicides were to protest Harvard's continued association with quote, lesser schools." According to that source, the note went on to call upon President George W. Bush to dissolve the Ivy league and allow Harvard to ascend to Heaven.
Dr. Mark Preston, an associate professor at Harvard's divinity school, said that suicides might be linked to highly secretive Order of the Silver Twilight, a militant Harvard supremacy group. Little is known about the organization's ideology, Preston said, except from a 1968 essay written an author only known as "Alexander". The essay claims that Harvard College is a divine institution created by God and that the College itself, along with its students and faculty, will ascend to Heaven during the final battle between the forces of good and evil. Over the last 38 years the group was widely believed to have grown more radical, Preston said, and the suicides "would show that the Order means business, that they are more committed than ever to the idea that the Ivy league is a Satanic restraint on Harvard's ascendance that must be destroyed."
As of the time of this writing, police were still searching for the accomplices, who could face up to 5 years in prison under Massachusetts law for assisting a suicide.
A detective in the Cambridge police department who asked not to be named so that he could speak more freely said that a suicide note had been found, and that police were still investigating its meaning. "[The suicide note] states that the suicides were to protest Harvard's continued association with quote, lesser schools." According to that source, the note went on to call upon President George W. Bush to dissolve the Ivy league and allow Harvard to ascend to Heaven.
Dr. Mark Preston, an associate professor at Harvard's divinity school, said that suicides might be linked to highly secretive Order of the Silver Twilight, a militant Harvard supremacy group. Little is known about the organization's ideology, Preston said, except from a 1968 essay written an author only known as "Alexander". The essay claims that Harvard College is a divine institution created by God and that the College itself, along with its students and faculty, will ascend to Heaven during the final battle between the forces of good and evil. Over the last 38 years the group was widely believed to have grown more radical, Preston said, and the suicides "would show that the Order means business, that they are more committed than ever to the idea that the Ivy league is a Satanic restraint on Harvard's ascendance that must be destroyed."
As of the time of this writing, police were still searching for the accomplices, who could face up to 5 years in prison under Massachusetts law for assisting a suicide.