Shakahola forest massacre: death toll in suspected Kenyan cult rises to 47

Kenyan police investigating a suspected starvation cult exhumed dozens of bodies over the weekend.

Investigators have so far “recovered 47 corpses from shallow graves” near the southern coastal city of Malindi, after Christian preacher Paul Makenzie Nthenge “is thought to have encouraged his followers to starve themselves to death to ‘meet Jesus’”, reported The Times. The bodies of “entire families”, including children, have been found, and an 800-acre forest in Shakahola has been cordoned off.

A tip-off led police to arrest Nthenge earlier this month and raid his property, where they found 15 emaciated people, four of whom later died.

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According to Kenyan daily The Standard, Nthenge had renamed three “villages” Nazareth, Bethlehem and Judea, and each had a pond in which he allegedly baptised his followers before they embarked on their fast. “In every village, the ‘man of God’ chose security teams and named them ‘disciples’,” the paper reported.

Nthenge – who was previously arrested and bailed in March over the deaths of two children in their parents’ care – denies wrongdoing and claims he shut down his Good News International Church in 2019. He remains in custody, pending a court appearance.

Authorities “finally acknowledged the horrific scale of the atrocity as a massacre” at the weekend, said Nairobi-based newspaper The Nation. Interior Minister Kithure Kindiki tweeted on Sunday that the “unfolding Shakahola Forest Massacre” was the “clearest abuse of the constitutionally enshrined human right to freedom of worship”.

This “horrendous blight on our conscience” must lead to “severe punishment” of the perpetrator or perpetrators, he wrote, but also “tighter regulation of every church, mosque, temple or synagogue”.

A police source told Agence France-Presse on Saturday they had “not even scratched the surface”, with exhumations still ongoing. Yesterday, Kenya Red Cross said 112 people had been reported missing in relation to the investigation.