Chief pathologist recalls Shakahola bodies nightmare

Government pathologist Johansen Oduor says the exhumation of the Shakahola bodies was not as easy as initially thought.

Speaking to health and science reporters at the ongoing Kenya Medical Research Institute Annually Scientific (Kash) conference in Nairobi, the government’s chief mortician said they were called in to exhume just two bodies, but that turned out to be a whole year’s task.

“On March 22, we, the Office of the Chief Government Pathologist, received notification from the Directorate of Criminal Investigations (DCI) requesting for exhumation of bodies of two children who had been buried in a shallow grave at Shakahola after starving to death because of extreme religious practices,” he said in a presentation titled: Shakahola Cases; Human Remains Identification Process.

He added, “This was upon application by the DCI to a magistrate court in Malindi  which issued an order for exhumation, as per the previously mentioned law.”

The exercise kicked off at the Shakahola forest in March, but it went all the way to November as they discovered more bodies.

“This shocked us. It hasn’t been easy task as it has consumed much more time than expected,” he said at a press conference in the side-lines of the annually meeting, which is in its 14th year.

Another challenge in the phased exercise according to Dr Oduor is that the process took long due to the severe decomposition of the bodies, rendering it exceedingly difficult to employ the nuclear DNA approach in their analysis, which identified both male and female genes.

Consequently, the team, he said, has been compelled to resort to alternative methodologies to facilitate their investigations.

Apart from that, the testing lab was overwhelmed as there were so many cases to deal with.

“We also had the challenge of limited resources, and some of the samples were degraded,” he said.

The quality of some samples they were getting, he noted were in a bad status.

“Some of the bodies had decomposed to the extent of becoming skeletons. Getting DNA from skeletons takes a lot of time unlike nuclear DNA extraction, that is why we have taken this long,” said Dr Odour

He also expressed disappointment that some of the families of those suspected to have died under the Mackenzie religious doctrines, have refused to be involved in the ongoing exercise, an indication many bodies could be disposed off in mass graves.

“Identifying some of the bodies exhumed from the forest last year has been challenging,” he said, explaining that some relatives have refused to undertake a DNA test to match the bodies with their respective families.

According to the pathologist, some of the relatives who showed up said they didn’t want to be associated with their kin who had willingly joined Paul Mackenzie’s church. “Once you have collected DNA samples of the deceased, you have to match to the relatives so that we can know this person is related to this person,” the government pathologist said.

While taking delegates through the step by step of the exercise, he revealed that some of the relatives came and gave their samples but others declined.

Mass grave

“They said they are not going to be involved and what does that mean? We will not be able to identify some of these bodies and so we may resort to the mass grave, and that’s the likely thing to happen,” Dr Oduor said, revealing that the teams that are involved, will meet soon to have a plan in place on how to release the bodies.

“We are resuming the exercise in March 2024 in which we will receive the results of DNA, release identified bodies to relatives and embark on the last phase of the exercise,” he said.

The next phase according to the doctor, involves recovery, identity, post-mortem examination, evidence collection and documentation.

Oduor revealed that so far 429 autopsies had been conducted with the results for the DNA tests being waited for.

Embalming process

So far all the bodies that have been exhumed have been embalmed to ensure that they don’t decompose any further. Embalming is the process of introducing a disinfectant solution to the internal environment of the body when someone passes away. It delays changes to the body that occur after death, giving the deceased a more restful appearance and, in some situations, removing some visible effects of the cause of death.

The pathologist also revealed why excavators were not used during the exhumation of bodies buried in Shakahola forest.

He said the process required a high level of scientific approach.

He disclosed there were suggestions from the police that the excavation process to be done using excavators to make work easier and reduce the workload.

The government pathologist said the process was done with utmost care to ensure no evidence was lost, which would have been crucial in identification of the bodies.

He noted that some of the bodies were badly decomposed hence the need to rely on skeletons to extract samples for DNA testing.

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