Pastor with decaying blood detained over alleged links to cult in Mombasa

Mombasa police are holding three people including a woman and evangelical priest, allegedly, found with blood soaked clothes and shoes in a car in the parking lot of a busy street in the coastal city.

Police also claim the suspects were found with what they believe to be decaying blood in a bottle and a generator have now opened an investigation on possible illegal cult activity.

And the police said they were alerted by security guards who detected a pungent smell from the car when it broke down in the parking lot when its occupant came to fetch the unnamed.

Deputy OCPD for Mombasa Patrick Njoroge said "we have arrested two suspects who we found with rotten blood and are helping us with investigations,” adding that police also recovered cow horns from the vehicle.

Although witnesses said three suspects were arrested Njoroge mentioned only two and also denied reliable accounts that photographs of three female students were also found on the suspects. Njoroge did not name the suspects.

The guards told The Standard that they were hit by the smell when they offered to help push the stalled car. The suspects told the guards the smell was emitted from the rotting remains of a chicken but the disbelieving guards screened the car and discovered clothes, shoes and a red liquid believed to be blood from a human being or other mammal.

Some police officers who asked not to be named said they suspect the females in the photographs could be dead or victims of the suspects suspected cult acts.

The photographs were found among a pair of male and female shoes, blue jeans and a red t shirt alongside the bottle with the red liquid wrapped in polythene bags inside in a black bag.

One of the suspects told police he is a priest from Kilifi who was visiting Mombasa to exorcise demons from an alleged possessed woman.

"We asked him whether we could be off help after the car stalled, but when we started to work on the vehicles we noticed that there was a foul smell that was coming out of the car. We asked him what was in the vehicles and he only told us that it was the smell of dead chicken which he had kept in the car for the last three days and nothing suspicious," said Dorcas Abaru, a security guard.

"We thought that they might have killed someone and that they were trying to run away, that is why we raised the alarm for police to come," said Steven Asede a security guard at the premise said.