Kenyan Cult Leader Found Guilty of Murdering 191 People in Shakahola Forest Massacre

POLICY WIRE — Mombasa, Kenya — A Mombasa court on Monday found a self-proclaimed Kenyan preacher and his associates guilty of murdering 191 people, consisting of 190 children and one adult, in connection with a notorious starvation cult.

The judge stated satisfaction that the prosecution successfully proved the case against all 29 accused individuals for the 191 murders. Hundreds of bodies have been uncovered since 2023 at the cult’s compound located inland from the coastal resort town of Malindi, an atrocity widely referred to as the Shakahola Forest Massacre.

Paul Mackenzie was accused of persuading his followers to starve themselves to death so they could meet Jesus. Mackenzie and his co-accused entered not-guilty pleas to 191 murder counts in 2024, while Mackenzie has also contested separate charges of manslaughter and terrorism.

Over the three years following the initial gruesome discoveries, authorities have unearthed additional bodies of children, women, and men, pushing the cumulative death toll well past 400. Mackenzie maintained an impassive expression upon arriving at the Mombasa Law Courts alongside the 29 other defendants, who arrived handcuffed in pairs aboard a barred-window bus.

Numerous victims’ relatives attended the court proceedings, having traveled from rural coastal communities to Mombasa. Francis Wanje, a 62-year-old who lost eight family members including his daughter and two grandchildren in Shakahola, shared his perspective before the session began.

This day, to me, is a very, very important day, Wanje told AFP, expressing his expectation that the ruling would serve as a public deterrent to prevent similar tragedies. He also voiced frustration regarding initial government inaction, which has fueled widespread calls across Kenya for stricter oversight of religious organizations given that Mackenzie had been arrested twice previously and released.

Prosecutors alleged that Mackenzie initiated and directed extreme fasting practices across his 800-acre ranch in the Shakahola Forest, enforcing a structured hierarchy of death that mandated children perish first, followed by teenagers, women, and finally men. Postmortems and police documentation revealed that while most victims died from starvation, others succumbed to asphyxia, neck compression, and traumatic head injuries.

Defense attorneys representing Mackenzie argued that the case relied heavily on circumstantial evidence, hearsay, and inconclusive forensic conclusions. Law enforcement initially detained Mackenzie in April 2023 after receiving a tip from a human rights organization and successfully rescuing several followers.

The subsequent police intervention revealed extensive shallow graves, generating a surging death toll that temporarily halted excavations due to local morgue capacity limits. The Kenya National Commission on Human Rights reported a death toll of 429 in 2024, and several victims remain unidentified.

In January, authorities charged Mackenzie over the discovery of another 52 bodies located in a nearby village. The self-styled pastor possesses a documented history of extremism, having founded the Good News International Church in 2003 with branches in Nairobi and along the Kenyan coast that drew thousands of followers, despite his assertion that the church closed in 2019.

Devotees previously informed families and officials that Mackenzie preached starvation as the pathway to salvation, organizing members into smaller groups assigned biblical names who presumably died and were buried together in mass graves. State pathologists confirmed that while starvation claimed many exhumed victims, others bore distinct marks of strangulation.

Mackenzie previously faced a 2017 arrest for radicalization before being acquitted, and authorities detained him again in 2019 concerning two child deaths in Shakahola before releasing him on bail. Investigators noted that Mackenzie worked as a taxi driver during the early 2000s prior to launching the Good News International Ministry, rapidly gathering followers through fiery sermons delivered at his Malindi coastal church and later expanding his reach via an online presence.

Surviving members previously recounted to relatives that Mackenzie’s prophecies often materialized, highlighting a prediction regarding a great virus just prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. As citizens faced financial and medical hardships during the health crisis, Mackenzie capitalized on the climate by preaching about leaving worldly struggles behind and turning toward salvation.

Reporting by Policy-Wire (PW)