More hunger and death for the sect of hunger and death. Joseph Juma Buyuka, one of 30 Evangelical sect suspects arrested for starving more than 330 people to death in Kenya, died last week in police custody after a ten-day hunger strike.
Two other detainees are in a critical situation after refusing food and drink.
According to Kenyan police, the deceased was a prominent aide to the sect and “played a significant role in the crimes that led to the deaths and the illegal burial of the bodies,” but was not the main leader.
That figure falls on the self-proclaimed pastor Paul Nthenge Mackenzie, a very charismatic 50-year-old former taxi driver, also detained, and who in 2003 founded the Church of the Good News, a fundamentalist Christian sect that promised its followers to “find Jesus.” ” through extreme fasting.
Mackenzie instigated hundreds of Kenyans, most of them from broken or very humble families, to follow him to a farm on the outskirts of the village of Shakahola, in the southeast of the country, and abandon their “earthly life.”
His delirium led to one of the largest religious massacres on record in the African country: in addition to the 336 corpses, including several children, exhumed so far on the farm grounds, another 600 missing are being sought.
As the region’s morgues are overwhelmed, authorities have ordered a staggered search for other mass graves or graves on the farm’s grounds.
Although most of the deaths were apparently due to starvation, according to the investigating coroner, Johansen Oduor, some victims were strangled, drowned or severely beaten before dying.
Precisely on April 13, the magnitude of the massacre was discovered after the police investigated some parents for strangling their two children. The parents later claimed to have been abetted by Mackenzie.
In addition to detaining the cult leader, who is accused of “terrorism”, his wife and 34 aides, the police rescued 95 survivors. Many refused to eat despite being in a critical situation and one of them ended up dying days later.
To prevent more deaths, the judge accused those released of “attempted suicide” and ordered their entry into a mental supervision center.
The prosecutor in the case also requested the transfer of the main leaders suspected of carrying out the massacre from police stations to a jail where they could be forced to eat.
Although the measure was approved, police control was relaxed after the detainees assured that they would cooperate and eat again.
Criticism has raged on the authorities for not preventing the induced killing despite the evident radicalization of their leader, who had been arrested on several occasions for encouraging his followers not to take their children to school or demonizing vaccines. When police pressure mounted, Mackenzie simply moved his cult to the Malindi farm, near the coastal city of Mombasa, and disappeared from the law enforcement radar.
The so-called “Shakahola forest massacre” has opened up the debate about the control of the more than 4,000 churches or evangelical sects that operate, often without control, throughout Kenya.
President William Ruto, who is a fervent Protestant and in the 2022 elections received the support of some of the most powerful churches in the country, ordered the creation of a working group for the “review of the legal and regulatory framework that governs the organizations religious”.
In previous attempts to control these religious congregations, the opposition of their leaders, in the name of religious freedom, was frontal.
Last week, the Kenyan Home Minister, Kithure Kindiki, announced that, once the investigations are complete, they will turn the Shakahola Forest into a “place of memory so that Kenyans and the world will not forget what happened”.
