A Kenyan pastor is being investigated for cult activities after allegations he and other church elders sexually abused a number of women and girls, police said.
The case came to light after the church run by Daniel Mururu in Meru County in central Kenya was torched by irate locals late last month.
Mururu, of the East African Pentecostal Churches of Kenya, as well as church elders and ushers, are accused of indecent assaults including stripping women naked, shaving their pubic hair and having sexual intercourse with them, according to a police report dated Monday.
More than seven women and girls ranging in age from 17 to 70 are alleged to have been assaulted, including a 17-year-old schoolgirl who became pregnant, the report said.
Police said their initial investigations had established that Mururu was “running a cult” that had radicalized its followers.
The church members were induced to engage “in indecent acts” for fear of consequences such as “sickness and barrenness” if they defied the pastor’s orders, the police report said.
A devout largely Christian nation, Kenya has struggled to regulate unscrupulous churches and cults that dabble in criminality.
In a macabre case that shocked the world, the leader of a Kenyan doomsday starvation cult was arrested in April last year after bodies were found buried in mass graves.
Rescuers spent many months searching a remote scrubland inland from the Indian Ocean town of Malindi and have now unearthed a total of 448 bodies from the shallow graves.
Autopsies revealed that the majority of victims had died of hunger. But others, including children, appeared to have been strangled, beaten or suffocated.
The horrific saga dubbed the “Shakahola forest massacre” led the government to flag the need for tighter control of fringe denominations.
A commission set up by President William Ruto to investigate the deaths and review regulations governing religious bodies presented its report in July, calling for a hybrid model of self-regulation and government oversight.
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