The charges against them are serious. Two Kenyan pastors appear in court on Tuesday suspected of involvement in the deaths of at least 109 people in a forest in southeastern Kenya, a case that has sparked fear and misunderstanding in the religious East African country. ‘East.
The self-proclaimed pastor of the International Church of Good News, Paul Nthenge Mackenzie was presented, along with eight other defendants, in a Malindi town court. He is accused of pushing his followers to starve “to meet Jesus” in the nearby Shakahola Forest. He is notably targeted by charges of “murder”, “conspiracy to murder”, “kidnapping with a view to locking up” and “cruelty towards children”.
He appeared calm in the box, wearing a pink and black sports jacket, a pink shirt and brown pants, an AFP journalist noted. About a hundred kilometers away, one of the country’s most famous pastors, Ezekiel Odero, is expected in court in Mombasa, the country’s second city, where he was transferred after his arrest in Malindi on Thursday.
Among the victims, a majority of children
The court must rule on a request by prosecutors to keep him in detention for 30 days while they investigate his possible involvement in what is now called the “Shakahola Forest massacre”. According to the prosecution, “there is credible information linking the exhumed bodies (…) to Shakahola” with “several innocent and vulnerable followers (of the Odero church) who would have died”.
The discovery of more than a hundred bodies, the majority of them children, in the Shakahola forest has shaken Kenya for several weeks. This assessment is still provisional, as the search for mass graves has not been completed in this forest on the Kenyan coast, where followers of Pastor Mackenzie followed his precepts of fasting until death while awaiting the coming of Jesus.
Many of the victims found appear to have starved to death. But initial autopsies carried out on Monday on a dozen bodies also revealed two deaths by asphyxiation. The arrest of the wealthy and famous televangelist Ezekiel Odero has also drawn a new lead in this case: the victims may not all be members of the International Church of Good News.
This scandal has revived the debate on the supervision of worship in Kenya, a predominantly Christian country which has 4,000 “churches”, according to official figures. Previous attempts at regulation have met with strong opposition, particularly in the name of freedom of worship.