A Kenyan court on Friday sentenced Paul Mackenzie, the self-proclaimed pastor behind a starvation cult, to 200 years in prison for killing 190 children and one adult.
Justice Diana Kavedza, reading the judgment, split the term into two parts: 100 years for murder by starvation and another 100 years for direct homicide. The 191 victims died of starvation on his orders and were buried in a forest.
Twenty-eight accomplices, convicted with Mackenzie last month, also received prison terms of varying lengths. They had threatened and beaten victims to make sure his orders were carried out.
A doomsday sect and its defense
Mackenzie and his Good News International Church ran a Christian doomsday sect. Followers were told to starve themselves and their children so they could reach heaven and meet Jesus before the end of the world.
Mackenzie denied the murder charges, arguing he had not forced anyone to starve, but the court in Mombasa rejected that defense. Dressed in a grey polo shirt and black trousers, he smiled as he walked into a tent erected outside the court for the hearing.
Graves in Shakahola Forest
Police arrested him in 2023 following a tip-off. Weeks later, authorities started finding bodies in the Shakahola Forest near the coast of southeastern Kenya, some scattered in shallow graves, others dumped in latrines. Some victims had been buried alive.
Kenyan authorities say more than 400 people died in the Shakahola tragedy, ranking it among the country's deadliest cult-related disasters. Its scale compares with a doomsday cult in Uganda that killed more than 700 people in 2000 and the 1978 Jonestown massacre in Guyana, where more than 900 died after an American cult leader ordered them to drink poison.
The discovery of mass graves and signs of severe malnutrition prompted nationwide scrutiny of religious violence and of the government's failure to spot the group sooner. It also came to light that Mackenzie had been arrested twice before and released, and calls have grown for tougher rules on religious organizations.
