Kenyan cult leader found guilty of murder in 191 deaths

A Kenyan court has found doomsday cult leader Paul Mackenzie and 29 other leaders guilty of murder in a case involving 191 deaths, all but one of them children. Mackenzie ordered followers to starve their children so they could “meet Jesus,” the BBC reported. The defendants pleaded not guilty and repeatedly denied that anyone was forced to die.

In an eight-hour judgment, Justice Diana Mochache said Mackenzie’s followers believed he was “Jesus’s mouthpiece.” According to the BBC, one co-accused person said Mackenzie had instructed followers that anyone who resisted an order to fast “must be forced to go to heaven through kicks and blows.” Burials in the forest where some devotees had relocated were called “weddings.” Those who died were celebrated as having “wedded with Jesus,” the judge said.

Mackenzie established Good News International Ministries in the coastal city of Malindi in 2003. The church attracted thousands of followers across Kenya and broadcast his sermons on its television station, Times TV. He preached that education was evil and that medicine was against his doctrine. After the main church shut in 2019, he moved to Shakahola forest, about 70 kilometres (43 miles) from Malindi, and encouraged devotees to follow him. Some relocated to the forest, where they lived in scattered mud houses.

Local herders discovered the first remains in 2023. Authorities said more than 400 bodies were found in shallow graves in the forest, according to the BBC. Al Jazeera reported 429 deaths in total, including people who later died in hospital, and said hundreds remained missing. Many bodies have not been identified because of advanced decomposition, the BBC reported.

Some victims died from strangulation or blunt trauma rather than starvation, authorities said, according to Al Jazeera. The BBC said gravediggers described finding children’s bodies with their hands and legs tied. One witness told the court that a pregnant woman was barred from nursing her newborn, who died 12 days later. “She was instructed to fast to death and follow her children,” the witness said, according to the BBC.

People close to Mackenzie offered sharply different accounts of his responsibility. Peter Shukrani, who was rescued from the forest in 2023, told the BBC that his mother threw away medication he needed because she believed only God could heal him. “I would have died if I wasn’t rescued,” he said. Yet he maintained that Mackenzie had not forced anyone to fast: “I still love him and he is still my pastor.” Mackenzie’s son Dan took a different view before the verdict, telling the BBC that his father, as the group’s leader, was responsible for the killings.

Mackenzie’s former head of security, Enos Amanya Ngala, entered a plea deal and became a prosecution witness. This was Mackenzie’s first verdict on the murder charges; he and other leaders also face cases involving terrorism, radicalisation and denying children an education, the BBC reported. He is due to be sentenced on 6 November.