KINANGOP: The leader of a Kenyan cult whose followers holed up in mud bunkers last month to ready for the apocalypse said yesterday that North Korea’s nuclear test vindicated their doomsday prophesy.
Eliezer Kamotho, an elder of the House of Yahweh sect in Kenya, said Pyongyang’s test was proof the world is about to be engulfed by a nuclear war that the group initially believed would begin on September 12.
“We were referred as liars when nothing happened on September 12th 2006, but our prophesy of a nuclear war is imminent,” he said from his bunker in central Kenya’s Kinangop division, a small trading post about 80km northwest of Nairobi.
“What has happened in North Korea is nothing new to us as we had openly told the world but nobody cared to listen,” Kamotho said.
Displaying an unusual grasp of international affairs for a rural farmer, Kamotho said the test, ensuring world outrage at North Korea and expected UN sanctions against the Stalinist state, marked the beginning of the end.
“North Korea is now under pressure from the US and its neighbours and this will result in war,” he said, adding that the spark for the conflict would be in the Middle East on the Euphrates River in Iraq.
The war will then draw in Israel, Syria, Iran, India, Pakistan, the US and China as well as North Korea, he said, dismissing as irrelevant his initial warning that Israel’s war against Hezbollah in Lebanon was the trigger.
“North Korea is an ally of Iran and both will attack Israel in a bid to assist Syria which will be under attack by Israel soldiers,” Kamotho said.
The House of Yahweh is a cult based in the US state of Texas although its followers in Kenya appear to be the only ones planning for the apocalypse.
The group attracted attention and concern from local authorities last month when gas-mask-clad believers in long overcoats and gloves took to their poorly constructed mud bunkers to hide from a predicted nuclear winter.
Police considered forcibly evicting them from the shelters, which they said were shoddily made and their possible collapse posed a more earthly threat to the members’ lives than a religious prophesy.
Despite the failure of nuclear war to begin on September 12 as predicted, cult elders insisted the end was still nigh, first arguing the conflict had not started on time due to international time differences.