Families shed tears of relief as first Kenya cult massacre bodies released

Kenyan authorities are releasing the bodies of victims of a doomsday starvation cult to distraught relatives, almost a year since the discovery of mass graves

DNA identification has been slow, with just 34 of the 429 bodies exhumed between April and October last year positively identified through DNA profiling

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Women belonging to the same family hold each other as they mourn after receiving the remains of several other family members who were victims of a Kenyan starvation cult, at a private mortuary in Malindi. Photo: AFP

Published: 10:31pm, 26 Mar 2024Updated: 12:43am, 27 Mar 2024

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, an AFP 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.

Morgue workers move a body of a victim of a religious cult for burial in Malindi. Photo: AP

“It is a relief that we finally have the bodies but it is also disheartening that they are only skeletons,” William Ponda, 32, told AFP, saying he has 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.”

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 to “meet Jesus” in what has been dubbed the “Shakahola forest massacre”.