The state has suffered a major blow in its effort to have Evangelist Ezekiel Odero of the New Life Prayer Centre and Church detained for 30 more days to allow for investigations.
Shanzu senior principal magistrate Joe Omido ordered the preacher to be released on a bond of Ksh3 million bond with one similar surety with an alternative of Ksh1.5 million cash bail.
Omido observed that the state in its second move to have Odero detained for 30 days was not in good faith.
“It has not been demonstrated that the state has not acted in good faith in seeking to have the respondent detained yet again. It still remains unclear how the respondent will interfere with ongoing investigations. As such I hereby order his immediate release upon meeting the above conditions and further order that the respondent should stay clear from making any type of statement to his followers in the public related to the subject in the ongoing investigations,” Omido stated.
The magistrate further ordered Odero to report to detectives drawn from the DCI once a week in accordance with directives from the DCI.
In the new development, the office of the Director of Public Prosecutions through the head of the prosecution Coast region Peter Kiprop, alongside principal prosecution counsel Anthony Musyoka had sought new orders to have Odero detained for 30 days on grounds that ongoing investigations had revealed that an unknown number of bodies exhumed at Shakahola ranch are now believed to have been removed from the preacher’s Mavueni church.
“Since the time of arguing the previous application, there have emerged new development in the sense that more bodies have been exhumed at the Shakahola crime scene, postmortem exercise has revealed that some of the deceased persons died as a result of strangulation and others died as a result of being hit by blunt objects. These are the bodies that are believed to have been from the suspect’s church,” Musyoka said.
