Kenyan officials discovered 22 more bodies Saturday (May 13) buried in the East African country’s Shakahola forest, raising the death toll of a starvation cult to 201, Reuters reports.

On Friday (May 12) officials exhumed 29 bodies, including the remains of 12 children buried in the one grave.

In a brief to reporters, Rhodah Onyancha, a regional commissioner, said on Saturday that one more suspect was arrested, bringing that total to 26 people detained in connection with the Good News International Church.

Paul Nthenge Mackenzie, pastor of doomsday church, surrendered April 14 to police in the town of Malindi and was charged in the deaths of two children whose parents were members of the church, the Associated Press reported. Authorities received a tip alleging that Mackenzie’s parishioners were starving themselves to death under his directions as a way to meet Jesus before the world ended.

Investigators found 15 people on the pastor’s property, most of them emaciated and unable to walk. Four of them died after they were transported to a hospital.

Meanwhile, a search and rescue operation is ongoing. The police have been digging up shallow graves in the forest and desperately looking for possible survivors. Hundreds of people are still missing.

Official autopsies found that some of the victims were apparently killed instead of starving themselves to death, The Washington Post reported. Prosecutors were considering several charges against Mackenzie, including murder, aiding suicide, radicalization, genocide and crimes against humanity, along with cruelty to children, fraud and other crimes.

Mackenzie is reported to have been against education and preached that it was evil to his followers.

"They know education is evil," Mackenzie said in a sermon, according to the BBC. "But they use it for their own gains. Those who sell uniforms, write books ... those who make pens ... all kinds of rubbish. They use your money to enrich themselves while you become poor."

In 2017 and 2018, Mackenzie was arrested for discouraging children from going to school because it was "not recognised in the Bible.”

Kenya’s president, William Ruto, took responsibility for the tragedy, saying that government authorities should have been able to prevent the deaths.

"It should not have happened when we have all the agencies. We have our intelligence, we have our CID (Criminal Investigations Department), we have chiefs and all the other people in the whole of that ecosystem," Ruto said, according to South Africa’s News24.