A Kenyan court has convicted cult leader Paul Mackenzie and about 30 co-defendants of murder in connection with the deaths of 190 children and one adult, in what is considered one of the worst cult-related tragedies in recent history.
Justice Diana Kavedza Mochache delivered the verdict on Monday in a hearing that ran for more than eight hours. She noted that in some cases, children were isolated and denied food while their own parents looked on. Mackenzie denied the murder charges, insisting he never forced anyone to starve, but the court rejected that defense.
Prosecutors argued that Mackenzie and his Good News International Church ran a Christian doomsday sect that instructed followers to starve themselves and their children to death, promising they would reach heaven before the world ended.
Mackenzie was arrested in 2023 after police received a tip-off, and within weeks authorities began finding bodies buried in shallow graves in the Shakahola forest, near Kenya’s southeastern coast.
Investigators have since recovered more than 400 bodies from the forest, many of them badly decomposed, and only 26 have been identified.
Monday’s judgment covered 191 of those deaths, while investigations into the remaining victims are still ongoing.
