Shakahola trial witness denies DNA evidence, insists missing children are alive
Muhoro told the court that officers from the Directorate of Criminal Investigations informed him in September that his DNA had been matched to the remains of a child recovered from the Shakahola forest.
A witness in the Shakahola massacre trial has left the court stunned after maintaining that his children, who disappeared in the infamous forest, are still alive even though scientific evidence points to the opposite.
Appearing before the Mombasa High Court, 44-year-old Antony Wyclif Muhoro said he continues to cling to hope for his four missing children, despite being told that DNA tests and a postmortem examination had identified one of the exhumed bodies as belonging to his seven-year-old daughter.
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Pastor Paul Mackenzie and 29 others are on trial over the deaths of 191 people, whom prosecutors allege perished as a result of a deadly cult doctrine centred on extreme fasting.
Muhoro told the court that officers from the Directorate of Criminal Investigations informed him in September that his DNA had been matched to the remains of a child recovered from the Shakahola forest.
Even so, he said he has been unable to bring himself to visit the mortuary where the body is kept, insisting he has not accepted that his daughter is dead.
Prosecutors confirmed in court that laboratory analysis showed a 99.99 per cent probability that the child was born to Muhoro and his wife, Millicent Oyayi Awour. A postmortem mirrored the same conclusion.
But the father insisted that his faith tells him otherwise.
“Your Honour, I am a prayerful person. In my dreams, I have seen that all my children are alive,” he told the court. “My wife has also told me they are alive and asked me to visit her in prison so she can tell me where they are.”
Awour, who is among the accused, is being held at Shimo La Tewa Prison. Muhoro said she reassured him during their brief communication that the children were safe, though she declined to reveal where they had been taken.
The witness narrated how, in March 2023, Awour informed him that Mackenzie’s followers in Nairobi had been advised to flee the city due to fears of post-election violence. She claimed she was travelling to Siaya to attend to her ill mother, but instead took their children to Malindi, where groups of adherents were allegedly assembling.
Muhoro said he realised matters had taken a disturbing turn when he later saw news reports of Mackenzie’s arrest on accusations of forcing followers, including young children, to fast to death. He immediately reported his wife and children missing at Makongeni Police Station.
A week afterwards, he received a call from Malindi Sub-County Hospital notifying him that one of the survivors had provided his contact details. On reaching the hospital, he found his wife admitted and initially unable to speak. Once she recovered her voice, she told him she had entrusted the children to a woman known only as Mama Nadia, who had never been located.
Investigators later instructed him to undergo DNA profiling, leading to the results now before the court.
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