Month: April 2023

The death toll at a ranch in Kenya owned by a pastor who is accused of leading a religious cult and ordering his followers to starve themselves reached 90 on Tuesday, as the country’s interior minister announced an expanded operation at the site.

The new figure came after police exhumed 17 more bodies. The total number of emaciated victims rescued now stands at 34.

The Kenya Red Cross Society said that with the latest figure on the number of missing at 213, the death toll could rise.

Pastor Paul Makenzie, who heads the Good News International Church, is accused of luring his followers to the ranch near the town of Malindi. He allegedly told them to fast to death in order to meet Jesus before burying them in shallow graves spread across his land.

He was arrested after police raided the property earlier this month, and remains in police custody.

Interior Minister Kithure Kindiki said that the security team will “upscale search and rescue missions to save as many lives as possible”.

“The entire 800-acre (320-hectare) parcel of land that is part of the Shakahola ranch is hereby declared a disturbed area and an operation zone,” Kindiki said while visiting the area.

The minister said there would be a turning point on how the country handles threats caused by religious extremism and was looking into another suspected cult in the same Kilifi county.

“We have cast the net wider to another religious organization here in Kilifi. We have opened a formal inquiry on this religious group and we are getting crucial leads that perhaps what was being done by Makenzi is a tip of the iceberg,” Kindiki said.

The teams digging at the site have been finding decomposed bodies buried in mass and single graves marked with a cross.

The Mombasa-based Muslims for Human Rights Group called on the government “to consider the option of using aerial surveillance by use of helicopters to rescue more people and make the process quicker”.

The autopsies on the bodies are set to begin on Thursday with local media reporting that government morgues in Kilifi are filled to capacity.

These are Kenya’s worst recorded cult deaths.

The broadcast regulator, Kenya Film and Classification Board sounded the alarm in 2017 on radicalization-like content by Makenzi on television. The board’s former chairperson, Ezekiel Mutua, told local media that the content was taken off air at the time and law enforcement agencies were notified.

The pastor had been arrested twice before — in 2019 and in March of this year — in relation to the deaths of children. Each time, he was released on bail, and both cases are still proceeding through the court system.

The interior minister likened the cult deaths to one run by U.S. preacher Jim Jones, whose 900 followers took poison in a mass suicide in 1978.

Other cult activities that ended up in mass deaths include Uganda’s Kanungu cult massacre in 2000 in which 700 followers died.

A former Prime Minister of Burundi, Alain-Guillaume Bunyoni, wanted for several days by the courts without the authorities communicating the reasons, has been arrested, announced on Saturday the National Independent Commission for Human Rights (CNIDH) and a senior security official.

Alain-Guillaume Bunyoni, who had been Prime Minister since June 2020, was removed from office on September 7 by President Evariste Ndayishimiye and replaced by Interior Minister Gervais Ndirakobuca.

Five days earlier, the Head of State had denounced in a speech the desire for a “coup d’etat” on the part of those who believe themselves “almighty” and are trying to “sabotage” his action.

Mr Bunyoni had long been seen as the regime’s true number two since the political crisis of 2015 and the leader of the hardliners among the generals working behind the scenes of power.

The National Independent Human Rights Commission made a visit on Saturday “to meet with General Alain Guillaume Bunyoni. He is doing well. He has not suffered any act of torture or any other abuse since his arrest”, said the CNIDH in a tweet.

Burundi’s Interior Minister, Martin Niteretse, announced at a press conference on Wednesday that Alain-Guillaume Bunyoni was wanted by the courts and that several searches had been carried out without being able to locate him, claiming to ignore the reasons. of these operations.

“In reality, General Bunyoni was arrested very quickly by the National Intelligence Service,” a senior security official told Africanewsguru.com, who requested anonymity.

Since the end of a civil war which ravaged the country between 1993 and 2006 and claimed 300,000 lives, the country has been held in an iron grip by the regime, thanks to the Imbonerakure, the youth league of the ruling party, the CNDD-FDD, and the National Intelligence Service.

While the international community has welcomed a certain openness in the country since Evariste Ndayishimiye came to power in June 2020 after the sudden death of Pierre Nkurunziza, a UN commission of inquiry affirmed in September 2021 that the human rights situation human rights remained “disastrous” in Burundi.

Since its independence in 1962, Burundi has been the scene of numerous massacres and conflicts between the Hutu and Tutsi communities, respectively estimated at 85% and 14% of its population.

Burundi, landlocked in the Great Lakes region, is the poorest country in the world in terms of GDP per capita according to the World Bank, which estimates that 75% of its twelve million inhabitants live below the poverty line.

South Africa captain’s might action in Rugby World Cup.

South Africa captain Siya Kolisi could miss out on leading his country’s Rugby World Cup defense after injuring his knee, according to a report on Monday.

South Africa’s Independent Newspapers group reported on its website that Kolisi sustained the injury playing for his Durban-based Sharks against Ireland’s Munster on Saturday. The 31-year-old loose forward is still waiting on a prognosis from doctors but risks being out of action for months.

If Kolisi has surgery, the recovery could take up to nine months which would rule him out of the Springboks’ title defense in France.

The captain could opt for rehabilitation instead but that would still keep him off the playing field for at least four months, returning to action only a few weeks before the tournament begins.

Kolisi led the South African team to victory in the 2019 Rugby World Cup in Japan to equal New Zealand’s record of three titles.

This World Cup, which kicks off on September 8, is expected to be the last for the captain, who will join French club Racing 92 after the rugby showpiece.

The Springboks will open the Rugby World Cup against Scotland on September 10.

The bodies of 34 illegal migrants who drowned while trying to reach Europe have been recovered from the coast of western Libya in five days, the Libyan Red Crescent (LRC) said Monday.

“For the second consecutive day, after the report of the sinking of a boat of migrants near the coast of Sabratha (west), 11 bodies were recovered and handed over to the authorities of the city, bringing the total number of bodies recovered to 34,” the LRC said on Facebook.

On Wednesday, the LRC reported six bodies found on the shores of Sabratha, 70 km west of the capital Tripoli and 17 more on Sunday.

Images posted on Facebook show LRC volunteers carrying bodies in black bags and depositing them in ambulances.

“An inflatable boat carrying dozens of migrants flipped over not far from the coast of Sabratha on Wednesday,” a security source in the city told Africanewsguru.com, estimating that “the number of casualties could increase.”

“In this kind of incident, the chances of survival are slim  especially since no call for help has been made,” added this source.

The NGO Alarm Phone, a group of volunteers that runs a hotline for migrants in difficulty, had claimed on Wednesday to have received a distress call from migrants on board an inflatable boat that was sinking off the coast of Libya with about 100 passengers on board.

The NGO had claimed to have tried to contact “the so-called Libyan coast guard”, but in vain.

The chaos that followed the fall of Muammar Gaddafi’s regime in 2011 has made Libya a preferred route for tens of thousands of migrants from sub-Saharan Africa, Arab countries, and South Asia, seeking to reach Europe via the Italian coast.

Libya is regularly criticized by NGOs for the mistreatment of migrants.

Clandestine crossing attempts, often deadly, are also increasing from neighboring Tunisia.

On Monday, the Tunisian coast guard announced that it had found 31 bodies of sub-Saharan migrants “decomposing and washed up on the shore”. Dozens of migrants were missing after their boats sank off the coast of Tunisia in recent weeks.

The authorities also announced on Monday that five migrants from sub-Saharan Africa had drowned in two separate shipwrecks off Tunisia in recent hours.

More than 50 fishermen in the West African state of Guinea have been hospitalised with a unknown skin ailment, the government’s spokesman said on Friday, a day after the authorities launched a probe into the incident.

Photos circling on social networks show fishermen with faces, mouths and limbs covered in pimples and lesions.

“Faced with this strange phenomenon, the government has set up an inter-ministerial crisis management committee made up of representatives of the ministries of the environment, fisheries, health, transport (and) mining as well as the maritime prefecture”, spokesman Ousmane Gaoual Diallo said in a statement Thursday.

He said a committee of scientists had taken samples of sea water in the suspect areas, and these were being analysed in laboratories in Guinea and abroad.

“While waiting for the results, the government urges fishermen to be cautious and avoid fishing areas with a compact ochre-coloured sheet of water,” he added.

Analyses carried out on fishery products brought in by the affected fishermen indicate they are safe to consume, the statement said.

In November 2020, hundreds of Senegalese fishermen contracted an unknown skin ailment with similar symptoms.

Senegal’s health ministry later ruled out the risk of contagion and reported that all cases were progressing favourably and without complication. It said it did not know the cause of the disease

The chief of staff of Colonel Assimi Goïta, president of Mali’s military-dominated transition, was among four people killed in an attack on Tuesday near the Mauritanian border, said a note from the presidency authenticated on Thursday.

According to the document, Oumar Traoré, Colonel Goïta ‘s chief of staff, was in the delegation victim of an ambush near the town of Nara, in a region plagued by jihadist attacks. The funeral takes place on Thursday in Kati, a garrison town near the capital Bamako, the same source said.

The note reveals the identities of the other three victims, a security guard, a contractor, and a driver. She also gives the name of another driver who is missing.

The delegation of “social works of the president” had come to prospect the drilling of wells for the local populations near the city of Nara, not far from the forest of Wagadou, known to shelter jihadists.

The unclaimed ambush in which the official delegation fell on Tuesday was revealed on Wednesday, but the identity of the victims had not been communicated until then.

An administrative official in the region told Africanewsguru.com that “the mission did not have an adequate escort”. A local elected official, for his part, warned of the security situation on site, which is deteriorating day by day.

An attack on such a high-ranking official is rare and significant. “While it is not yet clear if this is a targeted killing, it is certainly a concern for (the government),” said Rida Lyammouri, a senior fellow at the Policy Center for the New South, a Morocco-based think tank.

“Authorities should devote more resources to preventing large-scale attacks, including those that could target the capital,” Lyammouri added.

Mali has been plagued by jihadist spread and violence of all kinds since the outbreak of rebellions in the north of the country in 2012. Despite the presence of international forces, this violence has spread to the center of the country and to Burkina Faso and the neighboring Niger. The phenomenon progresses towards the south.

The security turmoil goes hand in hand with a deep humanitarian and political crisis. The colonels who took power by force in 2020 pushed the military alliance with France and its partners to pieces in 2022 and turned to Russia.

The colonels in power have pledged under international pressure to hand over to civilians by March 2024.

Assimi Goïta validated in March a draft Constitution which must be submitted to a referendum on a date yet to be defined and asked political actors and civil society to explain the issues throughout the territory.

Prime Minister Choguel Kokalla Maïga had recently been satisfied with the freedom of movement of the authorities, found according to him throughout the country. But he had been forced to give up stages of his visit to the north of the country due to insecurity.

Ten members of the same family, seven of them women, were killed in a mass shooting at a house in South Africa, police said Friday.

According to initial reports, they were ambushed by unknown gunmen at the home in the city of Pietermaritzburg in the eastern KwaZulu-Natal province, police said. The shooting happened Thursday night or early Friday morning.

Police Minister Bheki Cele was due to visit the scene on Friday.

South Africa has one of the highest homicide rates in the world and there has been a spate of mass shootings in recent years.

Eight people were fatally shot at a birthday party in the south coast city of Gqeberha in January. Last year, 16 died in a mass shooting at a bar in the Johannesburg township of Soweto when a group of armed men, some of them wielding rifles, opened fire on customers.