Kenyan pastor found guilty of ordering 190 children to starve to “meet Jesus”

The leader of a Kenyan doomsday cult, Paul Mackenzie, has been found guilty of murdering 191 people, all but one of them children.

Mackenzie ordered members of his Good News International Ministries to starve their children to death so they could “meet Jesus”. Twenty-eight other leaders of the cult were also convicted of murder. They had all pleaded not guilty, insisting nobody was forced to die.

Delivering an eight-hour judgment in Mombasa on Monday, 19 October, Justice Diana Mochache said Mackenzie’s followers believed he was “Jesus’s mouthpiece”.

One co-accused told the court Mackenzie had said anyone who “resisted the directive to fast must be forced to go to heaven through kicks and blows”.

The judge said burials in the forest where the cult was based were called “weddings”, with those who died celebrated as having “wedded with Jesus”.

Mackenzie established his ministry in 2003. Over the next 16 years, it grew to thousands of followers with branches across Kenya. He ran a television station, Times TV, broadcasting his sermons from Malindi.

His end-times preaching described education as forbidden and “evil”, modern medicine as “against the doctrine” and digital identity cards as “the mark of the devil”.

The main church shut down in 2019, and Mackenzie moved to Shakahola forest near the Kenyan coast, urging devotees to follow him.

By March 2023, when local herders discovered the first remains, hundreds had died. Mackenzie was arrested after more than 400 bodies were found in shallow graves in the forest.

Seventeen men from nearby Shakahola town were hired to exhume the graves, some paid just $8 a day.

Many bodies remain unidentified due to advanced decomposition and are listed in court documents as “unknown male child” by grave location and date of discovery.

The court heard harrowing witness evidence, including 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.

Mackenzie’s former head of security, Enos Amanya Ngala, was initially accused but entered a plea deal and became a prosecution witness.

Outside court, Stephen Mwiti, 48, who said he lost all six of his children to the cult, welcomed the verdict. His former wife was among those convicted alongside Mackenzie.

“I’m a happy man that all persons have been convicted,” he told the BBC. “All six of my children died in Shakahola forest. I only found and buried the remains of my son Samuel.”

Not all followers have turned against Mackenzie. One follower, Shukrani, said before the verdict: “Mackenzie didn’t force anyone to fast. People made those choices by themselves because of their beliefs. I still love him and he is still my pastor.”

Mackenzie and his co-accused also face other cases including terrorism, radicalisation and denying children education. This is the first verdict on the most serious charge of murder. He is due to be sentenced on 6 November.

More: BBC News