NAIROBI.— The leader of a Kenyan doomsday cult, Paul Mackenzie, who ordered his members to starve their children to death so that they could “meet Jesus” has been found guilty of murdering 191 people.
All but one of them children.
Mackenzie was the head of the apocalyptic Good News International Ministries, which he established with his wife in 2003 in the southeastern coastal city of Malindi.
Before that, he was a taxi driver in Nairobi. Burials inside the forest where the cult was based were called “weddings”.
Those who died “were celebrated as having wedded with Jesus”, the judge said.His doctrine said that education was forbidden and modern medicine was “evil”.
Delivering her eight-hour judgement, Justice Diana Mochache said Mackenzie’s followers believed he was “Jesus’s mouthpiece”.
Twenty-nine other leaders of his cult were also convicted of murder. They had all pleaded not guilty, repeatedly insisting that nobody was forced to die.
One of his co-accused said Mackenzie had told his followers that anyone who “resisted the directive to fast must be forced to go to heaven through kicks and blows”.
One witness said a pregnant woman was barred from nursing her new-born baby, who died 12 days later.
“She was instructed to fast to death and follow her children,” the witness said.
Mackenzie’s former head of security, Enos Amanya Ngala, was initially accused but then entered a plea deal and became a witness for the prosecution.
Mackenzie and other leaders of the cult also face a raft of other legal cases, including for terrorism, radicalisation and denying education to children.
But this is the first time the pastor has faced a verdict on the most serious charges of murder.
He is due to be sentenced on 6 November. In 2023, authorities said that over 400 bodies had been found in shallow graves in Shakahola forest near the Kenyan coast, where Mackenzie led his followers from across the country.
Seventeen men were hired from the nearby town for the horrifying task of digging up the shallow graves.
Some were paid just US$8 a day.
“Every grave we found had at least three bodies,” James, one of the gravediggers, told the BBC.
“Some of the remains were of children as young as a few weeks old.
“We once found 12 bodies of children in a line inside a grave. It was massive, the bodies were arranged like clothes. One on top of another.”
Gravediggers described some of the bodies of children as having had their “hands and legs tied and bodies wrapped in bedsheets”.
Although many of Mackenzie’s followers were from elsewhere in Kenya, some of the remains are of people who were familiar to the community because the people in the cult would often go to nearby Shakahola town for supplies and to fetch water from the River Galana which flows through the town.
“We would sometimes carry people on our motorbikes into the forest,” said Salim Karisa, another gravedigger.
“But it was so planned and secretive that nobody could tell what was happening inside.”
Stephen Mwiti, 48, recounted losing all six of his children to the cult and seeing “many bald women and tens of children” surrounding Mackenzie in his house when he went to confront him.
Mackenzie forbade make-up and hairstyles, so told women to shave off their hair or keep it unkempt.
Mwiti’s former wife was one of those convicted of murder alongside Mackenzie. “If I met Pastor Mackenzie today, one of us will have to die,” he told the BBC.
