Family missing four members
A Nandi family is in excruciating pain since four of their members are missing and are thought to have traveled to Shakahola in Kilifi county three years ago for prayers.
After telling their family they were heading to “Jerusalem to meet Jesus,” three school-age brothers and their uncle left their house for the dreaded Shakahola forest, where dozens of followers have perished in a death cult.
The disappearance of Mr. Morris Yimbo’s three boys, two of whom were in primary school and one in high school, who were lured away from home by their paternal uncle, has been causing his family sleepless nights for the past three years.
After finding that Mr. Yimbo’s kids and his younger brother had joined Paul Mackenzie’s cult in Kilifi, Mr. Yimbo’s family told of the search for the missing men. They think the four had passed away.
The whole thing began in 2020 when Wycliffe Omondi, Mr. Yimbo’s brother, told the family that he was heading to ‘Jerusalem’ to meet Jesus at the now-famous Shakahola woodland, where more than a hundred bodies have been exhumed.
Family missing four members
“The family was not even bothered when Omondi decided to change his denomination since he was an adult,” Mr. Yimbo stated.
However, months later, he returned home and introduced the cultic beliefs to the children without my knowledge,” Mr Yimbo explained.
Since then, the family has been waiting for the four to return home to Kiptuiya village.
Their silence has left the family in torturous agony, and Mr Yimbo and others now strongly believe they could be among those who died in the Shakahola massacre.
In 2020, when schools in Kenya were shut for nine months after the Covid-19 pandemic struck, Omondi, then 30, disappeared from home in Nandi with one of Yimbo’s sons, Vincent Lianda, 21.