At least five bodies have been recovered from shallow graves at a site in Kenya where victims of a religious cult are suspected to have been buried, according to authorities.

Excavations were continuing on Friday at the site on the outskirts of Malindi in southeastern Kenya’s Kilifi County, close to where hundreds of members of a doomsday cult were found dead two years ago.

Government pathologist, Dr Richard Njoroge, said on Thursday that the authorities expected to find more remains at the site.

“At the commencement of this exercise, we had 27 suspected graves. Today we managed to exhume six,” Njoroge said.

The pathologist added: “Of the six graves, we found five bodies. And then also around that area, we found 10 different scattered body parts, scattered in different places on the surface.”

Njoroge stressed that they expected to find more graves because the teams had not exhausted the search in a vast area.

“So we expect more bodies,” the official said.

‘Starved and suffocated’

In July, Kenya’s Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions said it believed victims buried at the site may have been “starved and suffocated as a result of adopting and promoting extreme religious ideologies”.

At least 11 suspects are being investigated in connection with the deaths, the prosecutors said.

People who live around the exhumation site had been unable to account for the whereabouts of several children, leading to suspicion of foul play and triggering investigations, according to the prosecutor’s office.

More than 400 bodies were exhumed from the nearby Shakahola Forest in 2023 in one of the world’s biggest cult-related incidents in recent history.