NAIROBI, Kenya (AFP)—At least nine bodies, including two children, exhumed on Kenya’s coast are linked to an infamous starvation cult that came to light in 2023, police told AFP on Friday.

More than 400 people died in one of the world’s worst cult-related tragedies, which became known as the “Shakahola Forest Massacre”, discovered inland from the Indian Ocean town of Malindi.

The case made global headlines. Self-proclaimed pastor Paul Mackenzie has pleaded not guilty to multiple counts of manslaughter at his trial in Mombasa.

Officers had excavated at least 27 sites further along the coast from Shakahola at a five-acre site near Binzaro village in Kilifi county’s Chakama area, Directorate of Criminal Investigations (DCI) officer Robert Kiinge told AFP.

On Friday, he announced they had found five bodies.

Kiinge said that most of the remains were in a state of advanced decomposition, indicating they had been in the ground for over a year, though one may have been buried as recently as seven to eight months ago.

“We had two remains of children,” he said, estimating their ages as between five and seven years old.

“Looking at what we are working on now there is no doubt there is connection with the old Shakahola,” he said.

Later, state pathologist Johansen Oduo said in a statement broadcast on Citizen TV that four more bodies had been exhumed. The victims had been buried naked in shallow graves, he said.

Eleven people have been taken into custody, Kiinge said, although three of them are being treated as victims.

“The people we have in custody today are followers of Mackenzie,” he said.

Kiinge said that until scheduled post-mortems are carried out investigators would not speculate on the cause of death.

The discoveries come after a Mombasa court this month adjourned the trial of Mackenzie, citing the discovery of new evidence.

Shakahola led the government to move towards tighter control of fringe religious groups, after accusations that it could have prevented the deaths.

Efforts to regulate religion in the majority-Christian country have been fiercely opposed in the past as undermining constitutional guarantees of the division between Church and state.