A court in Kenya has sentenced this Friday the leader of a sect, Paul Mackenzie, to 200 years in prison for causing deaths by starvation of 190 children and an adult, in the context of the massacre that the self-proclaimed “preacher” organized against his own followers between 2021 and 2023, an episode that left at least 430 dead among men, women, and minors.
Along with Mackenzie, the court in the coastal city of Mombasa has imposed sentences of between 100 and 160 years in prison on 26 other collaborators for their involvement in the massacres carried out in the forest near the town of Shakahola, in Kilifi County. In this area was located the headquarters of the International Church of the Good News, the cult that forced its members to undergo extreme fasting while awaiting the apocalypse.
The bodies began to appear after a relative of one of the devotees reported his disappearance in April 2023. From then on, the authorities were locating new mass graves in the forest, while survivors described how Mackenzie had manipulated his followers mentally and resorted to “death squads” to eliminate those who left the fast.
Search operations are still continuing in the Shakahola forest, where investigators continue combing the area amid the suspicion that there may be more corpses, since the missing number in the hundreds.
In the guilty verdict issued in October, the court determined that the fast was “communicated through village elders, reinforced during regular meetings, and enforced through a structured system.” The plan was carried out “sequentially, starting with the children, while guards controlled movement and prevented followers from escaping.”
During the reading of the sentence, Judge Diana Kavedza specified that more than 70 minors died from starvation, while around two dozen were killed by strangulation or by severe blows to the head. The advanced state of decomposition of the rest of the bodies makes it impossible to determine with exactness how they died.
“The evidence established that Mackenzie issued a directive requiring his followers to fast until death, starting with the children, and that the directive was enforced through violence, confinement, and retention of food and water until death,” states the judicial resolution released on social media by the Kenyan prosecution.
The sentence known now will not be the only one for Mackenzie, who still has to answer in court for other charges related to these killings, including terrorism offenses. In addition, another distinct massacre is attributed to him: that of 52 people whose remains were found in mass graves in Kwa Binzaro, after forced fasts that the guru himself would have ordered even while already in prison.