Starvation cult leader found guilty of murder of 190 children

A self-proclaimed Kenyan preacher and his associates were found guilty of murdering 191 people, all but one of them children, in an infamous starvation cult by a Mombasa court on Monday.

"I am satisfied that the prosecution has proved the case against all the 29 accused persons for the murder of 190 children and one adult," the judge said.

Hundreds of bodies have been discovered since 2023 at the cult base inland from the Kenyan beach resort of Malindi, in what became known as the "Shakahola Forest Massacre."

Paul Mackenzie is alleged to have incited his acolytes to starve to death in order to "meet Jesus."

Mackenzie and his associates pleaded not guilty to 191 counts of murder in 2024. He has also denied charges of manslaughter and terrorism in separate cases.

In the three years since the grisly discovery, more bodies of children, women and men have been unearthed, bringing the total to well over 400.

Mackenzie looked impassive as he arrived at Mombasa Law Courts on Monday with 29 other accused, who descended from a barred-window bus handcuffed in pairs.

Relatives of the victims were also in court, many making their way to Mombasa from rural communities along the coast.

Francis Wanje, 62, lost eight family members, including his daughter and two grandchildren, in Shakahola.

"This day, to me, is a very, very important day," he told AFP before the session started.

"We are expecting a ruling that will be a lesson to the whole public, so that such kinds of things will not happen again," he said, expressing anger over the initial government inaction.

There have been calls in Kenya for tougher regulations on religious organizations after it emerged that Mackenzie had been arrested twice in the past but released.

The prosecution alleges that Mackenzie "initiated and directed" extreme fasting at his 800-acre ranch in Shakahola Forest, claiming there was a "structured hierarchy of death" which said children should die first, followed by teenagers, women and then men.

The children mostly died from starvation, but also from "asphyxia, neck compression and traumatic head injury," prosecutors said, based on postmortems and police reports.

Mackenzie's lawyers said the case was "largely founded on circumstantial evidence, hearsay accounts and inconclusive forensic findings."

Case exposed

Mackenzie was arrested in April 2023, after a rights group tipped off authorities and some followers were rescued.

The subsequent police operation exposed hundreds of shallow graves, with a soaring death toll that required a pause in excavations as local morgues ran out of space.

The Kenya National Commission on Human Rights said in 2024 that the death toll was 429. Some victims are still unidentified.

In January, Mackenzie was charged over another 52 bodies found at a nearby village.

The self-styled pastor has a history of extremism and evaded law enforcement for years.

He established the Good News International Church in 2003, and set up branches in Nairobi and along Kenya's coast that attracted thousands of devotees, though he claimed it closed in 2019.

Followers have told their families and officials they believed Mackenzie when he preached that starvation was the path to salvation. He allegedly split members into smaller groups assigned biblical names. It's believed these smaller groups died together and were buried together in mass graves.

State pathologists have said many of the exhumed victims died of starvation, but some showed signs of strangulation.

Mackenzie was arrested in 2017 over charges of "radicalization" but was acquitted. He was arrested again in 2019 in relation to two child deaths at Shakahola, but released on bail.

Investigators have said Mackenzie was a taxi driver in the early 2000s, before he created the Good News International Ministry. Locals have said he quickly drew followers with fiery sermons at his church on the coast in Malindi, then from across Kenya with his online presence.

Several surviving members of the group have told family members that what he preached would often come true, citing as an example his prediction that "a great virus" would come, just before COVID-19 hit the country. As people struggled during the pandemic, financially and medically, Mackenzie preached about leaving the difficulties of life behind and "turning to salvation."