A Kenyan court has found doomsday preacher Paul Mackenzie guilty of the murder of 191 people — 190 of them children — in the Shakahola starvation cult, one of the worst cult-related disasters in modern history. The Mombasa High Court convicted Mackenzie and 28 of his followers on every count on Monday, after a judgment that took more than nine hours to read.
Justice Diana Kavedza Mochache told the packed, high-security courtroom: "I am satisfied that the prosecution has proved the case against all the 29 accused persons for the murder of 190 children and one adult." She threw out the defence claim that the victims — all of them under 16 — had chosen to fast to death. "I reject the defence by the accused persons that the victims voluntarily fasted to death," she said.
The court found that Mackenzie ran his Good News International Church as a cult built on a structured fasting programme, enforced through a chain of command. Children were put first in the fasting order; in some cases, Justice Kavedza said, children were isolated and denied food while their parents watched. Guards were posted to stop followers leaving the forest compound, and post-mortems showed some victims died not only of starvation but of asphyxia, strangulation and suffocation. The prosecution case rested on 123 witnesses, forensic DNA results, medical reports, digital records and evidence recovered from the mass graves.
Mackenzie sat in court in a striped polo shirt and red trousers, alongside his wife, one of the co-accused. When his name was read out, he stood silently, staring into space. Families of the dead filled the courtroom. Francis Wanje, 62, lost eight relatives, including two grandchildren. "It has been really a heavy thing for us as a family, and it has really taken us very far in terms of psychological problems," he said before the verdict. "I was hoping for this particular day."
The horror began in 2023, when a tip-off led police into the Shakahola Forest near Kenya's coast, in Kilifi County. Mackenzie had closed his church in 2019 and moved his followers to the remote ranch, preaching that the world was ending and ordering them to starve themselves and their children to meet Jesus. He banned formal education and condemned modern medicine as demonic. Exhumations eventually recovered more than 400 bodies from shallow graves — many so decomposed that only 26 could be identified. Monday's judgment covered 191 of the deaths; investigations into the rest are still ongoing.
Mackenzie denied the murder charges, insisting he never forced anyone to starve — an argument the court dismantled piece by piece over a judgment read from 9:30 in the morning until 6:29 in the evening. He and his co-accused return to court for sentencing on November 6, when one of the darkest chapters in Kenya's history reaches its punishment phase.
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