Kenyan starvation cult leader guilty of murder of 190 children and one adult

A Kenyan court has found the starvation cult leader Paul Mackenzie and about 30 others guilty of murder over the deaths of ⁠190 children and one adult in one of the world’s worst cult-related disasters in recent history.

Mackenzie was arrested in 2023 after police received a tipoff, and weeks later authorities began uncovering bodies in shallow graves in the Shakahola forest near the coast ⁠in south-eastern Kenya.

Prosecutors say Mackenzie and ⁠his Good News International Church organised ​a Christian doomsday sect in which they ordered followers to starve themselves and their children to death to go to heaven before the world ended.

Mackenzie denied murder charges, saying he did not force the victims to starve but the ⁠court rejected that argument.

In total, more than 400 bodies have been recovered from the Shakahola forest. Many were severely decomposed, and only 26 of them were able to be identified.

Monday’s judgment covered 191 deaths while investigations into the other deaths are continuing.

Justice Diana Kavedza Mochache said in a hearing lasting more than eight hours that in some cases children were isolated and denied food while their parents watched.

Mackenzie was in ​court, wearing a striped polo shirt and red trousers, sitting alongside his wife, ‌one of the co-accused.

He was silent, ‌staring into space before the ruling was handed down.

Relatives of some of those who died in the forest gathered to hear the judgment at Mombasa high ‌court.

Francis Wanje, 62, lost eight family members including two grandchildren to the cult.

Speaking before the verdict, he said: “It has been really a heavy thing [for] us as a family, and it has really taken us very far in terms of psychological problems … I was hoping for this particular day.”

The Shakahola tragedy has gripped Kenya since the discovery of mass graves in the coastal forest more than three years ago.

It raised questions over how Mackenzie was able to continue to operate despite having been on the radar of the authorities since 2017 when his premises were searched by police. In 2019, authorities shut down Mackenzie’s church and he relocated ‌to the Shakahola forest, police said.

The case has also led to calls for tougher oversight of churches and other religious organisations in a country where religious faith plays a prominent role in public life.

Kenya’s president, William Ruto, said in 2023 that government agencies should have been ​able to prevent the deaths. He said he took responsibility as president.

People with direct knowledge of the cult’s activities said Mackenzie planned the mass starvation in three phases: first children, then women and young men, and finally the remaining men.

Mackenzie, a former taxi driver, forbade cult members from sending their children to school and from going to hospital when they were ill, describing such institutions as satanic, some of his followers told Reuters for a 2023 article.

Cult members lived in makeshift homes of polythene ⁠sheeting and thatch that Mackenzie divided into areas with biblical names such as Jerusalem and Judea.

The plight of his followers began ​to emerge in mid-March 2023, when a local man told ​police that his brother and wife had starved their children ​to death in the forest on Mackenzie’s orders.

Mackenzie was arrested but released on bail, after which relatives say he brought forward the date ​on which he told his followers the ‌world would end. Police ​arrested him again in April 2023 and ​started combing through the forest more systematically and began exhuming mass graves.

Mackenzie faces other charges over the forest deaths including terrorism-related ones, which he has denied.

Prosecutors say while he was in detention he also directed the deaths of 52 people in Kwa Binzaro village, about 18 miles (30km) from Shakahola. Mackenzie has pleaded not guilty in that case.