Africa-Press – Kenya. The Government on Monday conducted postmortem on ten bodies exhumed from the Shakahola Forest. Victims of the mass deaths are believed to have starved themselves to death on the directives of Good News International Church preacher Paula Mackenzie on the belief of eternal life.
Autopsy results indicated that the bodies showed signs of starvation but two of them had indications of cyanosis – the medical term for when your skin, lips or nails turn blue due to a lack of oxygen in the blood. This, pathologists said, indicated that they died from asphyxiation, meaning they may have been suffocated to death.
“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,” Chief Government pathologist Johansen Oduor said.
He was assisted in the exercise by a combined team of pathologists including detectives from the Homicide Unit, Forensic Unit and Government chemist among others.
Oduor said all internal body organs were intact in the remains of those who underwent postmortem. He said the process was slowed as they had to first take X-ray of the remains for purposes of estimating the ages of the victims.
“Remember many of those were children, we needed to know their ages so that’s why we took some time and we only managed to do ten postmortems,” Oduor said.
He said only one of the ten bodies was of a female adult while the rest were children aged between one-and-a-half years to ten years. Oduor said consequent autopsy exercise slated for Tuesday will be faster considering they have already set up X-ray machines.
“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 added.
Earlier on Monday morning, Interior CS Kithure Kindiki said the autopsy process could take one week and the the DNA analysis up to one month. So far, 110 bodies have been exhumed from Shakahola Forest as aerial and land surveillance for identification of survivors and more graves continues.
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