Kenyan cult leader faces verdict over 191 starvation deaths

A Mombasa court will deliver a long-awaited verdict on Monday in the trial of a self-proclaimed Kenyan preacher and his associates, accused of murdering 191 people, mostly children, in an infamous starvation cult.

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”.

Self-proclaimed pastor 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 hand-cuffed in pairs.

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

“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 organisations 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 (325 hectare) 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 post-mortems and police reports.

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 mass 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 a further 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.

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