Children were suffocated after failing to die from hunger, Shakahola massacre trial told

The Shakahola massacre case, where Pastor Paul Mackenzie and 38 other accused persons are accused of subjecting a child to torture, assault causing actual bodily harm, cruelty to a child, and infringing a child’s right to education, continued before the Tononoka Children Court in Mombasa.

In a chilling session, the Senior Sergeant Joseph Yator, a former investigator in the ongoing Shakahola children torture and cruelty case, presented damning testimony shedding light on a victim who reported the death of the two children who were suffocated by their mothers after failing to die from fasting.

In dramatic testimony, the investigating officer told the court how he obtained a court order to exhume the two remains to establish cause of death.

The court heard that Pastor Paul Mackenzie was in court while he was granted an exhumation order. He detailed how Paul Mackenzie was initially released on police bond amid investigations.

“It was after his release that we discovered that the two graves where the bodies of two children were buried were empty,” said the former police officer.

He explained how one of the two bodies was later exhumed from a different grave and transferred for DNA testing, which revealed that 99% of the DNA matched that of the relatives.

The court also heard from the 44th witness, Julius Kiprotich, about how her wife traveled to her home area, where their two children were living in the custody of their grandmother, and destroyed all the children’s books and burnt their school uniforms after she began following Good News International preaching accused of anti-education teachings.

Alice Kawira, the woman at the center of the accusations, is also alleged to have withdrawn her mother, who had gotten ill and been taken to the hospital by people of good will, from the hospital and thrown away all of the medicine, claiming that going to hospital was satanic.

Kiprotich gave an emotional testimony describing how his wife and other followers of the Good News International Church celebrated the death of his secondborn child rather than lamenting after the wife failed to take him to the hospital instead of mourning.

He told the court how the wife secretly removed the child from school and relocated to Shakahola.
“She cut off all communication,” he said.

Kiprotich further revealed that he had made several attempts to locate his wife and the child before eventually discovering their whereabouts through media reports during the Shakahola mass graves inquiry.

Kiprotich’s mother, Hellena, also corroborated his evidence by confirming that Alice Kawira and Julius were indeed a couple and had two children together.

Her testimony supported Kiprotich’s claims that Alice Kawira withdrew his child from school in Eldoret and moved to Malindi.