Kenyan pastor accused of multiple sexual abuse

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A Kenyan pastor is being investigated for cult activities after he and other church elders were accused of sexually abusing numerous women and girls, police said.

The case came to light after the church led by Daniel Mururu in Meru County, central Kenya, was set on fire by angry locals late last month.

Mururu of the East African Pentecostal Church in Kenya, as well as church elders and ushers, are accused of, among other things, stripping women naked, shaving their pubic hair and having sexual intercourse with them, according to a police report on Monday.

More than seven women and girls between the ages of 17 and 70 were said to have been attacked, including a 17-year-old schoolgirl who became pregnant, the report said.

Police said their initial investigation revealed that Mururu “led a cult” that had radicalized its followers.

The church members were tricked into “indecent acts” out of fear of consequences such as “illness and infertility” if they did not follow the pastor’s instructions, the police report says.

Kenya is a predominantly Christian country and struggles to regulate unscrupulous churches and sects involved in criminal activities.

In a macabre case that shocked the world, the leader of a Kenyan doomsday hunger cult was arrested in April last year after bodies were found in mass graves.

Rescue workers searched for months in remote bushland inland from the Indian Ocean town of Malindi and have now dug up a total of 448 bodies from shallow graves.

Autopsies revealed that the majority of the victims had starved to death. Others, including children, had apparently been strangled, beaten or suffocated.

The gruesome saga, dubbed the “Shakahola forest massacre,” prompted the government to say that tighter control of marginal religious communities was needed.

A commission appointed by President William Ruto to investigate the deaths and review the regulations governing religious institutions presented its report in July and called for a hybrid model of self-regulation and government oversight.

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