Forest search resumes for Kenyan death cult victims of ‘highly organised crime’
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SHAKAHOLA FOREST, Kenya, May 9 (Reuters) – Kenyan investigators have resumed the search for members of a doomsday cult in a forest where more than 100 corpses, mostly of children, have been exhumed, victims of a “highly organised crime”, Interior Minister Kithure Kindiki said on Tuesday.
Paul Mackenzie, leader of the Good News International Church, has been detained and accused of ordering his followers to starve their children and themselves to death so they could go to heaven before the end of the world, which he predicted was going to happen on April 15.
With hundreds of people still thought to be missing, the search operation in the Shakahola forest in southeastern Kenya had been suspended for a few days because of bad weather but has now restarted, Kindiki said during a visit.
“We have many more graves in this forest, and therefore it leads us to conclude that this was a highly organised crime,” Kindiki told reporters.
He said on Twitter post-mortem examinations on 112 bodies exhumed or recovered from Shakahola had been concluded. Search and rescue efforts for people “suspected to be holed up in the thickets and bushes have been going on”.
Content retrieved from: https://www.reuters.com/world/africa/forest-search-resumes-kenyan-death-cult-victims-highly-organised-crime-2023-05-09/.
