MASS MURDER WAITING TO HAPPEN?

As police and prosecutors arrived to investigate Warren Jeffs' 10,000-strong enclave in Colorado City in Arizona this week, some residents were seen hurriedly moving out.

When state Attorney General Terry Goddard tried to serve subpoenas at the city's town hall, he found it deserted.

'People weren't exactly waiting for us with open arms in the front yard,' Mr Goddard told the Deseret Morning News in Salt Lake City.

'There's an awful lot of fences that have been built.'

Law enforcement officers described the atmosphere in the isolated town, a stronghold of Jeffs' Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (FLDS), as tense.

On the outskirts of the town, which straddles the remote Utah-Arizona border, an enormous wall has been built around Jeffs' castle-like compound.

State-of-the-art surveillance equipment has also been fitted.

In recent speeches, Jeffs has been prophesising that a final showdown between the faithful and the outside world was coming, the FBI says.

ARMED SIEGE?

This has led some in US law enforcement circles to fear that he is planning an armed siege to avoid arrest.

They fear confronting him could provoke a tragedy like the 1993 siege of the Branch Davidian sect in Waco, Texas, which led to the deaths of around 80 members.

A Utah official told news agency AP last year: 'Jeffs is someone who is capable of very different things. Whether that includes a mass suicide, I don't know.

'But I worry about it all the time.'

But Mr Rodney Parker, a lawyer for the FLDS since 1990, told the Los Angeles Times yesterday that Jeffs had been unfairly cast as the next Jim Jones or David Koresh - cult leaders who died with their followers during violent confrontations with authorities.

'Jeffs is charismatic. He is intellectual. He is not crazy. He is not paranoid.

'He is very serious about his religion,' Mr Parker said.

Despite the conflicting images, one thing is clear: Jeffs' four-year reign as head of the FLDS has been the most tumultuous in the secretive sect for 50 years.

His authoritarian rule has sparked internal conflict, which in turn has brought unwelcome scrutiny from law enforcement agencies that have have turned a blind eye to the sect's polygamy since a 1953 raid on the community ended in shambles.

Ironically, reported the LA Times, there is nothing physically imposing about Jeffs.

'He's tall and reedy with a quavering voice and, acquaintances say, an especially limp handshake,' reported the paper.