A self-proclaimed Kenyan preacher and his associates were found guilty of murdering 191 people, all but one of them children, in an infamous starvation cult by a Mombasa court on Monday. "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," the judge said. 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." 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 handcuffed in pairs.
Relatives of the victims were also in court, many making their way to Mombasa from rural communities along the coast. Francis Wanje, 62, lost eight family members, including his daughter and two grandchildren, in Shakahola. "This day, to me, is a very, very important day," he told 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 organizations 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 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 postmortems and police reports. Mackenzie's lawyers said the case was "largely founded on circumstantial evidence, hearsay accounts and inconclusive forensic findings." 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 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 another 52 bodies found at a nearby village.
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