A Kenyan court has sentenced cult leader Paul Mackenzie to 200 years in prison for the murders of 190 children and one adult who were starved to death on his orders and buried in a forest near the country’s Indian Ocean coast.
Justice Diana Kavedza delivered the judgement on Friday at Mombasa, setting the term as 100 years for murder by starvation and a further 100 years for direct homicide. Twenty-eight accomplices, convicted alongside Mackenzie last month, received sentences ranging from 10 to 160 years.
Mackenzie, a self-proclaimed pastor, led the Good News International Church, an apocalyptic Christian sect based in forest land in eastern Kenya. Prosecutors said he instructed followers to starve themselves and their children to death in order to reach heaven before the end of the world. His accomplices threatened and beat victims to ensure the orders were followed. Emaciated bodies were later recovered from shallow graves and latrines; some victims had been buried alive.
He had denied the murder charges, maintaining that he did not force anyone to starve. The court rejected the defence. Defence lawyer Lawrence Obonyo, who represents Mackenzie and almost all of those convicted with him, said he would appeal.
Accounts of the wider death toll differ. Reuters put the number of suspected victims at around 500, while Al Jazeera cited Kenyan authorities as saying more than 400 people died in what is known as the Shakahola tragedy. Either figure places it among the deadliest cult-related mass killings of modern times, comparable in scale to the Ugandan doomsday sect that killed more than 700 people in 2000 and the 1978 Jonestown deaths in Guyana.
Police arrested Mackenzie in 2023 after a tip-off, and bodies began to be uncovered in the Shakahola Forest weeks later. The case prompted national scrutiny of religious groups operating outside state oversight and renewed calls for tighter regulation, after it emerged that Mackenzie had been arrested twice before and released on each occasion.
