Video clips show frail Makenzi followers in Shakahola forest

Video clips of the Shakahola “doomsday cult” played for the first time in court show how dozens of frail and malnourished faithful who were fasting could not even run to evade arrest by police.

The clips also reveal that the faithful of Good News International (GNI), linked to controversial pastor Paul Makenzi, planned to undertake large-scale irrigation farming in the Chakama ranch.

A small distance from Makenzi’s mud and makuti thatched houses, there is a huge dam, which Chief Inspector Sawe Kigen told the court he believed was for irrigation of farms and watering animals.

A video taken by the police from a helicopter shows the dam christened ‘Makenzi Dam’ was filled with water. However, it is not clear who dug the dam and the source of the water.

Makenzi’s homestead, was separated from the other houses. Equally, all the 265 homesteads of the faithful had water pans.

The makuti-thatched houses were roughly built with mud and most of them had no doors.

Outside some homesteads, the videos show some loose red soils, plantations of soya beans, and other legumes like cowpeas. Detectives said beneath soya beans and loose red soil were mass graves.

“There were other areas with loose soil but had no graves or bodies but the camouflage is where they had planted soya beans over the bodies,” said Senior Sgt Livingstone Lihanda from the DCI.

Lihanda was among the top forensic experts from the DCI who testified before the Mombasa Chief Magistrate in a case where Makenzi and 92 others are facing manslaughter charges over the death of 450 people.

The controversial preacher and 29 others are also charged with the alleged murder of 191 people, mostly children, inside the Shakahola forest. In Tononoka court, the accused faces charges under the Children Act 2022.

In the new video evidence, women are seen lying inside thickets unable to stand or walk even as the police raided Shakahola in Chakama ranch in search of the graves of two children who had been reported missing.

Chief Inspector Kigen also showed videos of bodies being exhumed from shallow graves that had been buried in Shakahola forest.  In one video, seven bodies were exhumed from a grave.

Kigen said they commenced exhumation on April 21, 2023, from the shallow graves.

“On May 10, 2023, 69 bodies were recovered. We were marking bodies retrieved from the forest differently from the ones exhumed,” said Kigen.

Kigen told the courts that the graves were dug close to what he termed as fasting canopies and he formed an opinion that they planted cowpeas on the farms to camouflage the graves.

“Ninety sites were exhumed. In the early exhumation, we were using the intelligence reports and later did a random search. There were members of the communities that came from the village to help in the search but am not aware if they were vetted,” said Kigen.

However, Kigen was unable to establish if indeed the women in the thicket were fasting on instruction of Makenzi.

During cross-examination by Makenzi’s lawyer Lawrence Obonyo, Kigen said he did not find any evidence and material asking the women to fast and could not establish if they were fasting.

The video clips showed that most of the houses had foodstuff, including wheat and cowpeas. However, all the household goods were in disarray, an indication of intrusion or the owners left hurriedly.

Among the items recovered from one of the houses was an identity card of a Technical University of Mombasa (TUM) student Jeremiah Olwande who is among the 92 accused persons facing 296 manslaughter charges.

Kigen admitted that he would not categorically confirm if the people in Shakahola had been attacked due to animosity.  He said there were more than three structures that were burnt but the investigations never formed an opinion about the matter.

“So if they were attacked by these people they had animosity with you would not know?” Posed Obonyo.