A Kenyan pastor, Paul Mackenzie, has been convicted of murdering 191 people, including 190 children, after allegedly directing members of his religious sect to starve themselves and their children to death in a bizarre bid to “meet Jesus”.
The shocking verdict followed one of Kenya’s most disturbing mass-death cases, in which hundreds of bodies were discovered in shallow graves in Shakahola forest, exposing the horrifying consequences of the pastor’s extreme religious teachings.
According to the BBC, 28 other leaders of Mackenzie’s religious group were also convicted of murder. All the defendants had pleaded not guilty, repeatedly denying that anyone was forced to die.
Delivering an eight-hour judgement in the coastal city of Mombasa, Justice Diana Mochache said Mackenzie’s followers regarded him as “Jesus’s mouthpiece” and obeyed his teachings.
One of the co-accused told the court that Mackenzie had ordered his followers to enforce fasting through violence against anyone who resisted.
Those who refused to comply, the witness said, were to be forced “to go to heaven through kicks and blows”.
The court also heard that the cult gave chilling names to its burial practices, with graves in the forest described as “weddings” and the dead celebrated as having “wedded with Jesus”.
CHILDREN BURIED IN SHALLOW GRAVES
The scale of the killings emerged as investigators and workers excavated graves scattered across the vast forest.
Seventeen men recruited from a nearby town were engaged to exhume the graves, with some reportedly paid as little as $8 a day.
One of the gravediggers, identified as James, told the BBC that the discoveries left a horrifying picture of the deaths.
“Every grave we found had at least three bodies,” he said, adding that some of the remains belonged to babies only a few weeks old.
He recalled finding 12 children buried in a single grave, their bodies stacked on top of one another.
The workers also reported discovering children whose hands and legs had been tied, with their bodies wrapped in bedsheets.
Another gravedigger, Salim Karisa, said some of the victims were familiar to residents of neighbouring Shakahola because members of the sect occasionally visited to buy supplies and collect water from the River Galana.
According to him, people were sometimes transported into the forest on motorbikes, but the secretive nature of the settlement made it difficult for outsiders to understand what was happening inside.
Some victims were reportedly so weak from starvation that they died while rescuers or workers were carrying them out of the forest.
HOW PASTOR BUILT HIS FOLLOWING
Mackenzie founded Good News International Ministries in 2003, building a religious following through branches across Kenya over the next 16 years.
His church also operated a television station, Times TV, from Malindi, where his sermons were broadcast to followers.
Among his controversial teachings were claims that formal education was “evil”, healthcare was contrary to religious doctrine and digital identity cards represented “the mark of the devil”.
His son, Dan Paul Mackenzie, who said he worked as a cameraman for the church, recalled how members gathered for worship.
Children sat at the back, adults occupied the middle, and worshippers spent the morning singing religious songs before Mackenzie began preaching around noon.
Some of the sessions reportedly involved what the church described as casting out demons.
The church’s main branch closed in 2019, after which Mackenzie moved to Shakahola forest and encouraged his followers to join him there.
SURVIVOR SAYS MOTHER ABANDONED HIS MEDICINE
Among those drawn into the forest settlement was Peter Shukrani, 23, who moved there with his mother after attending Mackenzie’s church from the age of eight.
Shukrani regarded the pastor as his spiritual father, but his experience in the forest exposed the dangers of the sect’s rejection of conventional medicine.
He said he fell ill after moving to the settlement, where medication was prohibited under the group’s teachings.
His condition worsened after his mother discarded the medicines he needed, believing that only God could heal him.
“My mother would throw away all the medicine I was supposed to take because she believe that only God could heal me,” he told the BBC.
Describing their life in the forest, Shukrani said members lived in scattered mud houses, fasting for days before taking small meals.
He was eventually rescued after spending weeks bedridden and believes he would have died without intervention.
“I would have died if I wasn’t rescued from Shakahola forest,” he said.
The first remains were discovered by local herders in March 2023, by which time hundreds of people were feared to have died.
The subsequent investigation uncovered a mass-death tragedy involving victims who died from starvation and other forms of violence, including strangulation and bludgeoning.
Many of the recovered bodies remain unidentified because of decomposition. Court records have listed some victims simply as “unknown male child”, with investigators relying on grave locations and discovery dates to distinguish them.
SURVIVOR STILL DEFENDED PASTOR
Despite the horrifying accounts of suffering and death, Shukrani continued to defend Mackenzie before the verdict was announced.
He insisted that the pastor had not forced anyone to fast, arguing that followers acted according to their religious beliefs.
“Mackenzie didn’t force anyone to fast. People made those choices by themselves because of their beliefs. I still love him and he is still my pastor,” he said.
However, Mackenzie’s son believed his father should face conviction because of the authority he exercised over the followers.
“He was the leader, he was someone who they were looking [up to]. So he is a murderer of mass killing,” Dan Mackenzie said before the verdict.
The conviction marks a major development in the Shakahola forest tragedy, which shocked Kenya and drew international attention to the dangers of religious extremism and the exploitation of vulnerable followers.
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