More hunger and death for the cult of hunger and death. Joseph Juma Buyuka, one of the 30 suspects of the evangelical sect arrested for having starved more than 330 people to death in Kenya died last week in police custody after ten days of hunger strike. Two other detainees are in critical condition after refusing any food or drink.

According to the Kenyan police, the deceased was a prominent aide of the sect and “had a significant role in the crimes that led to the deaths and illegal burial of the corpses”, but was not the main leader. This figure belongs to the self-proclaimed pastor Paul Nthenge Mackenzie, a very charismatic 50-year-old former taxi driver, also arrested, and who in 2003 founded the Church of the Good News, a fundamentalist Christian sect that promised its followers ” find Jesus” through extreme fasting. Mackenzie instigated hundreds of Kenyans, most of them from unstructured or very humble families, to follow him to a farm on the outskirts of the Shakahola forest in the south-east of the country, and abandon their “earthly life”.

Their delirium led to one of the biggest religious massacres in the African country’s memory: more than 336 corpses, including several children, exhumed so far on the farm’s grounds, 600 more are missing. As the region’s body depots have collapsed, 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 coroner in charge of the investigation, Johansen Oduor, some victims were strangled, drowned or brutally beaten before they died.

Precisely on April 13, the magnitude of the slaughter was discovered after the police investigated some parents for having beaten their two children. The parents later alleged that they had been instigated by Mackenzie.

In addition to arresting the leader of the cult, who is accused of “terrorism”, his wife and 34 assistants, the police rescued 95 survivors. Many refused to eat even though they were in a critical situation and one of them ended up dying after a few days. To prevent more deaths, the judge accused the freedmen of “suicide attempt” and ordered them to be admitted to 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 quarters to a prison 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 feed themselves again.

Criticism has grown of the authorities for failing to prevent the induced killing despite the evident radicalization of its leader, who had been arrested several times for encouraging his followers not to take their children to school or for demonizing the vaccines

As police pressure mounted, Mackenzie simply moved his sect to Malindi Farm, near the coastal city of Mombasa, and disappeared from the law’s radar.

The so-called “slaughter in the Shakahola forest” has opened 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 staunch Protestant and in the 2022 election received the support of some of the most powerful churches in the country, ordered the creation of a task force for the “review of the legal and regulatory framework that governs religious organizations”.

In previous attempts to control these religious congregations, the opposition of their leaders, in the name of freedom of worship, was frontal.

Last week, Kenyan Home Affairs Minister Kithure Kindiki announced that once the investigations are complete, they will turn Shakahola Forest into a “place of remembrance so that Kenyans and the world will not forget what happened”.