NAIROBI - The death toll from a Kenyan starvation cult crossed 300 on Tuesday after the authorities exhumed more bodies in a forest, in one of the worst cult-related tragedies in recent history.
The authorities said the dead were members of the Good News International Church, led by Paul Mackenzie, who is accused of ordering his followers to starve themselves and their children to death so they could go to heaven before the end of the world.
A total of 303 people are now believed to have died after 19 bodies were exhumed from mass graves in Shakahola forest in the country's south-east region.
More than 600 people are still reported missing, regional official Rhoda Onyancha said.
Investigators last week expanded their search to cover a wider area in the region to try to account for more victims.
About 65 rescued followers of the self-styled pastor were charged with attempted suicide on Monday after they refused to eat between June 6 and June 10 during their stay at a rescue centre, local media reported.
Interior Minister Kithure Kindiki expressed concern last month that some of Mackenzie's rescued followers were refusing food. One of them had died, he said at the time.
Mackenzie handed himself over to police in April and was denied bail last month. He has not yet been required to enter a plea.
He was arrested on suspicion of the murder of two children by starvation and suffocation earlier this year but was subsequently freed.
Relatives of his followers say he then returned to the forest and moved forward his predicted end of the world date from August to April 15.
Uganda
Meanwhile, Ugandan authorities said on Tuesday that 80 cult followers from the country's east had been deported from Ethiopia where they travelled believing they would find salvation through starving.
The followers of Church Christ Disciples from Soroti travelled to Ethiopia in February after their pastor claimed they would find Jesus there after 40 days of fasting, said a spokesman for Uganda's internal affairs ministry.
"Working with the Ethiopian government, we were able to process their repatriation and they are all safely in Uganda," the spokesman, Simon Mundeyi, told AFP.
"A joint security and intelligence team has put the religious cult leader, Pastor Simon Opolot, who is a Ugandan, on the wanted list and he will be apprehended."
He said the followers were drawn from across Soroti, a largely rural area, and told to sell all their possessions because the world was coming to an end.
"They were fasting for 40 days and on the 41st day is when they were to meet Jesus Christ," said Mundeyi.
"But Ethiopian officials learnt of their arrival in the country, picked them (up) and confined them until their repatriation documents were ready."
The authorities in Uganda were alerted to the plan by concerned residents in Soroti after the cult followers began leaving for Ethiopia.
In 2000, some 700 members from the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God in Uganda burned to death in one of the world's worst cult-related massacres.
Members of the cult, which believed the world would come to an end at the turn of the millennium, had been locked inside a church, with the doors and windows nailed shut from the outside.
The building in south-western Uganda's Kanungu district was then set alight.
REUTERS and AFP