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Kenyans struggle to comprehend starvation cult massacre as first bodies are finally released for burial
By
David McKenzie and
Sarah Dean, CNN
4 minute read
Updated 1:33 PM EDT, Wed March 27, 2024
The family members clutched each other and wailed as attendants pulled small bundles out of the funeral van. Remains so degraded that a handwritten card identified each victim of the cult.
“I did not believe to see my people the way they are. The condition is very bad,” Francis Wanje told CNN.
“It has been a very tough journey from last year to now. A very tough one. Fortunately, I am happy that I’ve gotten [my] loved ones,” he said, after receiving their bodies.
On Tuesday, Wanje became the first family member to retrieve the bodies of his relatives for burial after they became victims of a tragedy, dubbed the Shakahola massacre, that many Kenyans find hard to comprehend. In the days and weeks to come, authorities hope to release more bodies back to families.
Witnesses and prosecutors say that starting in 2019 and over a period of many months, charismatic pastor Paul Nthenge MacKenzie, a former taxi driver living in Malindi, lured hundreds of followers to the remote Shakahola forest to prepare for the end of the world.
Mortuary workers move the remains of several members of the same family who were victims of the Kenyan starvation cult.
Luis Tato/AFP/Getty Images
The remains are the first to be handed over to their families after nearly a year of painstaking work to identify them using DNA.
Luis Tato/AFP/Getty Images
Government officials and survivors contend that he convinced followers to starve themselves to death to reach salvation, starting with the children. Autopsies show that most died of starvation, while others were bludgeoned to death.
In June last year, CNN reported on how authorities were slow to react to
rumors coming from the cult commune.
Now a scathing official report, released this month by the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights (KNCHR), has outlined a pattern of failure, delays and negligence in the government response that the Commission says could have contributed significantly to the awful scale of the tragedy.
“The Commission faults the then security team in Malindi for gross abdication of duty and negligence,” the 33-page report reads. It describes how authorities failed to act on credible intelligence of the cult activities from several sources, alleging that they could have saved more lives.
RELATED ARTICLEHow faith turned deadly for Kenyan cult followers who chose starvation as path to salvation
The Commission found that police ignored numerous reports filed at the local police station, authorities ignored warnings about radicalization at meetings, and how, in one case, a former follower was admonished and intimidated after posting specific warnings about the pastor and Shakahola on social media. Instead, they accepted a complaint from the pastor himself about the posts.
In the two years before he retreated with his followers to the forest, MacKenzie had also been arrested on suspicion of radicalization several times.
“The negligence and failure of the security and administration structures left MacKenzie’s followers at the full control and mercy of MacKenzie and his militia,” the KNCHR report reads.
Kenya’s interior cabinet secretary, Kithure Kindiki, has repeatedly apologized for the failures of the government response. Security officers were transferred from the area. Yet promises of more serious penalties have not materialized, despite a government commission of enquiry.