A Kenyan court on Thursday (May 4) released on bond a televangelist detained last week as part of an investigation into the deaths of dozens of people whom police say starved themselves to death on the instructions of a cult leader.

Kenya’s interior minister accused Pastor Ezekiel Odero after his arrest last Thursday of involvement in the “mass killing of his followers”, without elaborating.

A document presented in court last week said police had established that several deaths were recorded at Odero’s church and that those bodies may have been moved to a forest about 66km away, where more than 100 bodies have been exhumed in the past two weeks.