MOMBASA, Kenya — A Kenyan court has found self-proclaimed pastor Paul Mackenzie guilty of murdering 191 people, all but one of them children, who starved to death after he ordered followers of his doomsday cult to fast so they could “meet Jesus,” BBC News, The Guardian and DW reported.
Twenty-eight other leaders of his Good News International Church were also convicted of murder. All had pleaded not guilty. “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,” Justice Diana Kavedza Mochache said on Monday after a hearing lasting more than eight hours in Mombasa, DW reported. Sentencing is set for Nov. 6.
The judge said Mackenzie’s followers believed he was “Jesus’s mouthpiece,” and that in some cases children were isolated and denied food while their parents watched. Prosecutors described a “structured hierarchy of death” in which children were to die first, followed by teenagers, women and then men. Post-mortems showed the children mostly died of starvation, but also from “asphyxia, neck compression and traumatic head injury,” prosecutors said.
Mackenzie was arrested in 2023, after more than 400 bodies were found in shallow graves in the Shakahola forest near Kenya’s coast. Many were severely decomposed and only 26 have been identified, The Guardian reported. Monday’s judgment covered 191 deaths, and investigations into the others are continuing. Mackenzie also faces terrorism-related charges, and prosecutors say he directed the deaths of 52 people in Kwa Binzaro village while in detention; he has pleaded not guilty in that case.
“I’m a happy man, that all persons have been convicted,” Stephen Mwiti, who lost all six of his children to the cult, told the BBC outside court. His former wife was among those convicted.
Mackenzie had been arrested in 2017 on radicalisation charges and acquitted, and again in 2019 over two child deaths before being released on bail, DW reported. President William Ruto said in 2023 that government agencies should have been able to prevent the deaths and that he took responsibility as president.
Sources: BBC News, The Guardian, DW
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