Over 200 bodies dug up amid Kenya cult case

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Written by northsouth

Category: Africa

Published: 13 May 2023

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NAIROBI - Kenyan police have exhumed the highest number of bodies in a single day from a forest in Kilifi, Kenya’s coastal region, which is linked to a controversial doomsday cult.

Twenty-nine more bodies were exhumed on Friday.

So far, over 200 people, believed to be members of the Good News International Church, are confirmed to have died either of starvation, strangulation or blunt force trauma.

The more forensic teams dig, the more bodies they find. One shallow grave had 12 bodies huddled together.

The Kenya Red Cross says 609 people who are reported to be members of the doomsday cult allegedly led by Paul Mackenzie are still missing.

Pastor Mackenzie said he closed down his church four years ago after nearly two decades of operation.

But the BBC has uncovered hundreds of his sermons still available online, some of which appear to have been recorded after this date.

In an interview with Kenya's Daily Nation newspaper a few weeks ago, Pastor Mackenzie also denied he had forced his followers to fast.

The number of missing cult members has tripled since the extensive rescue and exhumation operation began in late April.

Kenya’s Attorney General has admitted that the state failed to protect the alleged victims.

The cult leader is still in police custody. He is yet to be charged.

Sudan crisis forces South Sudanese refugees back to troubled home

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Written by northsouth

Category: Africa

Published: 08 May 2023

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By Denis Elamu

RENK, South Sudan - The last place Lina Mijok wanted to go as she fled fighting in Sudan was back to her own country, South Sudan, which she had left as civil war erupted in 2013.

But when Sudan's army started battling the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces in the streets around to her home last month, South Sudan was the only place she and her two young children could reach.

"I would not have come back to South Sudan. I would have gone anywhere, but I had no choice," the 26-year-old said.

She had managed to carve out a new life for herself as a housemaid in the city of Omdurman, across the River Nile from Sudan's capital Khartoum.

Then the shots started ringing out and her family had to pack up and leave that behind them - all of them apart from Mijok's husband.

He had to stay behind as they did not have enough money to pay for his place on the trucks and buses that carried Mijok, their son and their daughter to the border, a nerve-wracking two days on bush roads.

They are now among thousands camping out in South Sudan's Renk County, in a dilapidated university campus, its buildings pockmarked by bullets from fighting a decade ago.

The refugees have made basic shelters out of sticks and pieces of fabric. The United Nations refugee agency, UNHCR, and other aid groups are distributing food, water, buckets, blankets and mats.

"The heat is killing us and some people have gone four days without eating, and there is no place to sleep, and the children are getting sick," Mijok said. She hopes the United Nations will help her move to another country.

'WHAT SHOULD WE DO? WE DON'T KNOW'

The fighting has turned the humanitarian situation on its head.

Up to last month, more than 800,000 South Sudanese refugees lived in Sudan, refugees from decades of conflict.

Since the fighting erupted in Khartoum, the UNHCR has registered more than 30,000 people crossing into South Sudan, more than 90% of them South Sudanese. The true number is likely much higher, it says.

Aid agencies fear the influx will worsen an already dire humanitarian crisis in South Sudan where more than 2 million people are displaced and three quarters of the 11-million-strong population need aid.

South Sudan gained independence from Sudan in 2011 after two decades of north-south conflict. Civil war broke out there barely two years later, killing an estimated 400,000 people.

"South Sudan is one of UNHCR’s most underfunded crises already and we are now mobilising to support this new influx," agency spokesperson Charlotte Hallqvist said. "We urge the international community not to forget about South Sudan."

Like Mijok, Suzan William, 36, fled the civil war in 2013 and rebuilt her life in Sudan, working as a nurse in Khartoum. Now she is back in her homeland, camping in Renk with her four children.

"People say there is no stability in South Sudan, so we decided to build houses in Sudan. But now also there is no stability in Sudan. What should we do? We don’t know."

Kenya cult deaths hits 90 as authorities expand operation

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Written by northsouth

Category: Africa

Published: 25 April 2023

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By EVELYNE MUSAMBI

NAIROBI, Kenya — The death toll at a ranch in coastal Kenya that is owned by a pastor who is accused of leading a religious cult and ordering his followers to starve themselves reached 90 on Tuesday, as the country’s interior minister announced an expanded operation at the site.

The new figure came after police exhumed 17 more bodies. The total number of those rescued while starving at the ranch now stands at 34.

The Kenya Red Cross Society’s latest figure on the number of missing is 213.

Pastor Paul Makenzi, who heads the Good News International Church, is accused of luring his followers to the ranch near the town of Malindi. He allegedly told them to fast to death in order to meet Jesus before burying them in shallow graves spread across his land. He was arrested after police raided the property earlier this month, and he remains in police custody.

Interior Minister Kithure Kindiki said that the security team will “upscale search and rescue missions to save as many lives as possible.”

“The entire 800-acre (320-hectare) parcel of land that is part of the Shakahola ranch is hereby declared a disturbed area and an operation zone,” Kindiki said while visiting the area.

The minister said there would be a turning point on how the country handles threats caused by religious extremism and was looking into another suspected cult in the same Kilifi county.

“We have cast the net wider to another religious organization here in Kilifi. We have opened a formal inquiry on this religious group and we are getting crucial leads that perhaps what was being done by Makenzi is a tip of the iceberg,” Kindiki said.

The teams digging at the site have been finding decomposed bodies buried in mass and single graves marked with a cross.

Those believed to be living in mudwalled houses inside the ranch have been fleeing from rescue teams, and mostly those who can’t walk or talk have been rescued so far.

The Mombasa-based Muslims for Human Rights Group called on the government “to consider the option of using aerial surveillance by use of helicopters to rescue more people and make the process quicker.”

The autopsies on the bodies are set to begin on Thursday with local media reporting that government morgues in Kilifi are filled to capacity.

These are Kenya’s worst recorded cult deaths.

The broadcast regulator, Kenya Film and Classification Board, sounded the alarm in 2017 on radicalization-like content by Makenzi on television. The board’s former chairperson, Ezekiel Mutua, told local media that the content was taken off air at the time and law enforcement agencies were notified.

The pastor had been arrested twice before — in 2019 and in March of this year — in relation to the deaths of children. Each time, he was released on bond, and both cases are still proceeding through the court system.

The interior minister likened the cult deaths to one run by U.S. preacher Jim Jones, whose 900 followers took poison in a mass suicide in 1978.

Other cult activities that ended up in mass deaths include Uganda’s Kanungu cult massacre that killed 700 followers in 2000.