Kenyan Sect Leader Gets 200 Years for Murder of 190 Children

A Kenyan court has sentenced Paul Mackenzie, who led a doomsday sect, to 200 years in prison. He was convicted over the deaths of 190 children and one adult, in a case counted among the worst cult disasters in recent memory.

Two sentences of 100 years

The court in the coastal city of Mombasa handed down 100 years for murder by starvation and another 100 for direct homicide. It came two weeks after the same court found Mackenzie guilty.

The hearing lasted more than eight hours. Justice Diana Kavedza-Mochache said that in some cases children were isolated and denied food while their parents watched.

Mackenzie denied the murder charges. He said he had not forced anyone to starve. The court rejected that argument.

What prosecutors described

Prosecutors said Mackenzie and his Good News International church ran a Christian doomsday sect. The sect's rule, prosecutors said, was that followers and their children had to die of hunger. Death was presented as the road to heaven before the end of the world. His accomplices threatened and beat victims to make sure they obeyed.

Investigators found starved bodies in shallow graves and in latrines. Some victims had been buried alive.

Mackenzie is a former taxi driver. He told followers to keep their children out of school and away from hospitals when ill, which he called satanic. Followers lived in improvised homes of polythene sheeting and thatch, in areas he named after biblical places such as Jerusalem and Judea.

How the Shakahola forest came to light

In March 2023, a man told police that his brother and wife had starved their children to death in the forest on Mackenzie's orders. Mackenzie was arrested but released on bail. Relatives said he then moved up the date on which he told followers the world would end.

Police rearrested him and began combing the forest more systematically, exhuming mass graves. More than 400 bodies have been recovered in total. Only 26 of those bodies could be identified. Many were in a severely decomposed state.

Last month's judgment covered 191 deaths. Investigations into more than 200 other deaths are continuing.

Oversight and the cases still open

Police had searched Mackenzie's premises in 2017, so he was on the authorities' radar for years. In 2019, they shut down his church, and he relocated to the Shakahola forest. The case raised questions about how he kept operating, and it has led to calls in Kenya for stricter control over churches and other faith groups.

Mackenzie faces other charges over the forest deaths, including terrorism, which he denies. Prosecutors also say that while in detention he directed the deaths of 52 people in Kwa Binzaro village, about 18 miles from Shakahola. He has pleaded not guilty in that case.

Source: the Guardian