(MENAFN) At least five bodies have been uncovered from shallow burial sites in Kenya, where victims of a religious cult are believed to have been interred, according to officials from the East African nation.

Investigators unearthed remains from six graves on Thursday in Kwa Binzaro village, located in Kilifi County in southeastern Kenya. Among the bodies recovered were two children found together in a single grave.

This location is near the site where hundreds of followers of a doomsday cult were found dead in 2023, an incident that has come to be known as the Shakahola cult massacre.

“We had 27 suspected graves at the commencement… We managed to exhume six… Also around that area, we found ten different body parts scattered in different places on the surface,” explained Richard Njoroge, a government pathologist, during a press briefing.

Officials have called on family members of missing individuals to submit DNA samples in order to assist with the identification of the recovered victims.

At the end of last month, a court in Malindi granted Kenya’s Directorate of Criminal Investigations (DCI) permission to dig up bodies thought to be “concealed” within several shallow graves in the Kwa Binzaro vicinity.

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