Kenyan Starvation Cult Leader Found Guilty of Murdering 190 Children

by · Breitbart

A Kenyan doomsday cult leader on Monday was found guilty by a Mombasa court of murdering 190 children and one adult.

Self-proclaimed “Christian” pastor Paul Mackenzie and 28 others were convicted for their role in running a cult that ordered its followers to starve themselves so they could “meet Jesus” because, according to Mackenzie, the “end of the world was imminent.” Mackenzie established the Good News International Church in 2003, which was allegedly shutdown in 2019.

The BBC reports that the judgement was delivered through an eight hour-long court session by Kenyan judge Diana Mochache, who detailed that the cult’s followers believed Mackenzie was “Jesus’s mouthpiece.”  A sentencing hearing will take place on November 6.

Self-proclaimed pastor Paul Mackenzie (R), leader of the Good News International Church accused of causing the deaths of more than 400 followers in a starvation cult, appears alongside co-suspects at the Mombasa Law Courts in Mombasa, Kenya, on October 19, 2026. (Lucas Mukasa/Anadolu via Getty)

The gruesome case has been commonly referred to as the “Shakahola Forest Massacre” ever since hundreds of bodies began to be discovered at the cult’s base near the town of Malindi in March 2023, with over 420 bodies reportedly exhumed from the area. Given the advance state of decomposition in which they were found, many of the bodies remain unidentified.

Mackenzie was arrested in April 2023, and was formally charged in 2024. Additional charges against Mackenzie presented in January, with the possibility for additional charges in the future.

Throughout the trial proceedings, prosecutors determined that Mackenzie “initiated and directed” the starvation orders that led to the victims’ deaths at his 800-acre compound. Per AFP, prosecutors claimed that the cult maintained a “structured hierarchy of death,” with children dying first, followed by teenagers, women, and then men. Evidence of asphyxia, manual neck compression, and traumatic head injury were observed in some of the victims.

“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,” judge Mochache said, per AFP.

The BBC provided harrowing details of the murders that were disclosed by Judge Mochache during the trial.

An unnamed co-accused reportedly said that Mackenzie instructed his followers that anyone who resisted the starvation directive “must be forced to go to heaven through kicks and blows.” The bodies of the deceased were buried through a macabre ritual that the cult described as “weddings,” claiming that those who died were “celebrated as having wedded with Jesus.”

Additionally, an unnamed witness testified that a pregnant woman had been prohibited from nursing her newborn baby, who died days later. Mackenzie’s cult forbade education and modern medicine, deeming said practices to be “evil.”

FILE/Bethy Kahindi, 37, shows a picture on her phone of three of six daughters of her 45-year-old sister as she looks for their bodies at the morgue of Malindi Sub-County Hospital in Malindi, on April 26, 2023.  The discovery of mass graves in Shakahola forest near the town has shocked Kenyans, with cult leader Paul Mackenzie Nthenge accused of driving his followers to death by preaching that starvation was the only path to God. (YASUYOSHI CHIBA/AFP via Getty)

“She was instructed to fast to death and follow her children,” the witness reportedly said.

Stephen Mwiti, a 48 year-old man who lost all of his six children to the death cult, told the BBC that he is a “happy man” after the convictions. His ex-wife was among those convicted of murder alongside Mackenzie.

“I only found and buried the remains of my son Samuel,” Mwiti said.