Kenyan authorities on Tuesday began releasing the bodies of victims of a doomsday starvation cult to distraught relatives, almost a year since the discovery of mass graves in a grisly case that shocked the world.
One tearful family received four bodies that were loaded into a hearse from a morgue in the Indian Ocean town of Malindi, a correspondent at the scene said.
They are the first bodies to be handed over to their relatives for burial after months of painstaking work to identify them using DNA.
Photo: AFP
“It is a relief that we finally have the bodies but it is also disheartening that they are only skeletons,” William Ponda, 32, said, adding that he lost his mother, brother, sister-in-law and nephew in the tragedy.
“I do not have any hope that we will find the other members of the family,” he added.
Kenyan Ministry of Health chief pathologist Johansen Oduor and Kenyan Directorate of Criminal Investigations Director of Homicide Martin Nyuguto confirmed the handing over of the four bodies in Malindi and said they were expecting more to follow on yesterday and today.
Hundreds of bodies, including those of children, have been dug up from the shallow mass graves discovered in April last year in a remote wilderness inland from Malindi.
Self-proclaimed pastor Paul Nthenge Mackenzie is alleged to have incited his followers to starve to death in order to “meet Jesus” in what has been dubbed the “Shakahola forest massacre.” The former taxi driver turned messiah has pleaded not guilty to 191 counts of murder, manslaughter and terrorism. He has also been charged with child torture and cruelty.
So far, 34 of the 429 bodies exhumed between April and October last year have been positively identified through DNA profiling.
While starvation caused many deaths, some of the bodies, including those of children, showed signs of death by asphyxiation, strangulation or bludgeoning, government autopsies showed.
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