BUENOS AIRES (CWNews.com) - The brutal murder of a 50-year-old father at the hand of his two young daughters as part of a satanic rite has shocked Argentine society and raised concern about the proliferation of satanic and other cults in Buenos Aires.

    The mutilated body of Juan Carlos Vazquez was found on Monday surrounded by his two daughters, Silvina, 21 and Gabriela 29, who stabbed their father 100 times and ate part of his face.

    Yesterday, the police revealed the first details of the strange crime, announcing that the three of them belonged to a cult known as the "Alchemy Center for Transmutation." According to the police, apparently the father and daughters engaged in a ritual that ended with the murder of Juan Carlos Vazquez.

    Juan Carlos' body was found not only with 100 knife wounds, but also marked with cuts forming a strange figure.

    The killing took place in the living room, after the furniture was moved to one side. In the place were found cups with strange liquids and a book of "alchemy rites." When the police entered the home, the two daughters were screaming in a state of shock, one invoking Satan, the other one saying that Satan had finally left her father's body.

    "We can't know yet what happened exactly, because both women are temporarily under tranquilizers at a psychiatric institution," a police source revealed to the Clarin newspaper.

    According to Jose Maria Baamonde, a psychologist from Fundacion Spes, a Catholic institution dedicated to studying the growing number of sects and cults, the cult to which the Vazquez' belonged "is the type of organization that is becoming tremendously popular by combining some elements of Gnosticism and strange formulas and rites which they claim have been inherited from the ancient Alchemists."

    Baamonde explained that, despite the sect's self-portrayal as an institution devoted to self-knowledge and self-discipline, "some of their rites explicitly invoke the presence and power of the Devil."