A Kenyan judge on Friday ordered Paul Mackenzie, leader of a doomsday sect whose followers starved in a coastal forest, to spend 200 years behind bars for killing 190 children and one adult.
The term is split evenly: a century for murder by starvation and another for direct homicide. The court in Mombasa had convicted him two weeks earlier.
Prosecutors pressed for the death penalty. Justice Diana Kavedza-Mochache refused, reasoning that a man who views dying as release might welcome execution rather than fear it.
For persons who perceive death as deliverance, a death sentence may be perceived not as punishment, but as a triumph and a form of martyrdom
Justice Diana Kavedza-Mochache
In a sentencing hearing that ran past eight hours, the judge said the long prison term was meant to signal plainly that crimes of this kind deserve the toughest punishment the law allows.
Mackenzie stood trial with 28 co-defendants, including guards and gravediggers. Parents were among those convicted, and Mackenzie forced them to ensure their children died before they did.
According to prosecutors, sect members were told that starving themselves and their children would carry them to heaven ahead of the end of the world. Mackenzie's helpers beat and threatened anyone who wavered.
The judge described cases in which children were kept apart and given no food as their parents looked on.
How the killings came to light
Mackenzie denied the murder charges, arguing he never compelled anyone to go without food. The court did not accept that defense.
Authorities first learned of the deaths in March 2023, when a man went to police and said his brother and wife had starved their children in the forest at Mackenzie's direction.
Mackenzie was detained and then freed on bail. Relatives said he then moved up the date he had set for the world's end. Police took him back into custody and began a more methodical search of the forest, digging up mass graves.
More than 400 bodies have since been recovered from the Shakahola forest in southeastern Kenya, many so badly decomposed that only 26 have been identified. Remains turned up in shallow graves and latrines; some victims had been buried alive, and some bodies bore signs of strangulation.
Unanswered questions, more charges
Mackenzie, a former taxi driver who became a televangelist, founded his church, Good News International, in 2003, and it drew thousands of followers. Police searched his premises in 2017, and after authorities closed the church in 2019, he moved to the forest.
That history has left Kenyans asking how he kept operating while on officials' radar, and the case has prompted calls for closer oversight of churches and other religious groups.
The verdict addressed 191 deaths; inquiries into more than 200 others continue. Mackenzie also faces further charges tied to the forest, including terrorism, which he denies.
In a separate case, prosecutors accuse him of orchestrating 52 more deaths from his jail cell, in the village of Kwa Binzaro roughly 18 miles from Shakahola. He has pleaded not guilty.
