The government Monday started conducting postmortems on bodies exhumed from the Shakahola forest, Kilifi county believed to be followers of the controversial pastor Paul Nthenge Mackenzie.
The exercise is being conducted by a combined team of Government pathologists led by Johansen Oduor, detectives from the Homicide Unit, Forensic unit, and Government chemist among others.
On the first day of the briefing, Oduor said all the 10 bodies which were operated on showed signs of starvation but revealed that two of them had indications that they had cyanosis which means they could have been suffocated to death.
Oduor said two of them had cyanosis which is the blue discolouration of fingernails which could have been caused by asphyxiation.
Asphyxiation means the state or process of being deprived of oxygen, which can result in unconsciousness or death and suffocation
He said all internal body organs were intact in the bodies of those who underwent postmortem.
“We had initial challenges because we had to set up an X-ray we decided that we have to do X-rays on the bodies of everyone for the purpose of age estimation remember many of those were children we needed to know their ages so that is why we took some time and we only managed to do 10 postmortems,” he said.
He said of the bodies they conducted postmortem on one body was of one female adult and the rest were of children aged from one and a half years to 10 years.
“Generally most of them had features of starvation, we saw features of people who have not eaten, there was no food in the stomach, the layer of fat was very small the liver was fatty,” he said.
He said From Tuesday they will begin the other postmortem which will be faster considering they have already set up the X-Ray.
“So those are the autopsies we have done we have taken samples for further tests which include toxicology we have taken samples of DNA for purposes of identification,” he said.
Oduor said a look at the bodies showed they were starved however for the two children their fingernails had blue discolouration.
He said the blueish discolouration shows that the person when he died there was not enough oxygen coming into the body.
He said something could have happened to deny the person oxygen.
Interior Cabinet Secretary Kithure Kindiki said the process could take one week and the other one for DNA up to one month.
So far 110 bodies have been exhumed and the operation is going on in Shakahola forest using technology and aerial surveillance.
Dozens more bodies are believed to be buried in shallow graves therein.
Some 36 people have been rescued from starvation.
Mackenzie, who is in police custody, is being investigated for influencing his followers to starve to death in order to meet their maker.
Police also suspect that some of the victims did not starve to death and may have been killed and then buried on the property.
He has denied wrongdoing but has been refused bail. He insists that he shut down his church in 2019.
The followers say he told them to starve themselves in order to “meet Jesus”.
