Kenyan Doomsday Sect Leader Paul Mackenzie Jailed for 200 Years Over Deaths of 191 People

A court in the Kenyan port city of Mombasa has sentenced Paul Mackenzie, the leader of a doomsday sect, to 200 years in prison for the murders of 190 children and one adult. The sentence is made up of 100 years for murder by starvation and 100 years for direct homicide. It came two weeks after the same court found him guilty, and it closes one chapter of what is described as one of the worst cult disasters in recent history.

Prosecutors said Mackenzie and his Good News International church ran a Christian sect whose members were told to starve themselves and their children to death in order to reach heaven before the world ended. Accomplices threatened and beat victims to make sure they complied. The emaciated bodies were found in shallow graves and in latrines, and some of the victims had been buried alive. Mackenzie denied the murder charges and said he had not forced anyone to starve. The court rejected that argument.

Justice Diana Kavedza-Mochache delivered her judgment in a hearing that lasted more than eight hours. She said that in some cases children were isolated and denied food while their parents watched.

Mackenzie, a former taxi driver, forbade his followers to send their children to school or to go to hospital when they were ill, calling both institutions satanic. Members lived in makeshift homes of polythene sheeting and thatch in the Shakahola forest, in south-eastern Kenya near the coast. He divided the settlement into areas with biblical names such as Jerusalem and Judea.

The case began to unravel in March 2023, when a man told police that his brother and his brother's wife had starved their children to death in the forest on Mackenzie's orders. Mackenzie was arrested after the tipoff but released on bail. Relatives then said he brought forward the date on which he had told followers the world would end. Police rearrested him and began combing the forest more systematically, and weeks later authorities began exhuming mass graves.

In total, more than 400 bodies have been recovered. Many were severely decomposed, and only 26 have been identified. Last month's judgment covered 191 deaths, while investigations into more than 200 others are continuing.

The tragedy has gripped Kenya since the graves were found more than three years ago, and it has raised hard questions about how Mackenzie kept operating. Authorities had him on their radar since 2017, when police searched his premises. In 2019 they shut down his church, and police said he then relocated to the Shakahola forest. The case has prompted calls for tougher oversight of churches and other religious organisations in a country where faith plays a prominent role in public life.

The 200-year sentence does not end his legal troubles. Mackenzie faces further charges over the forest deaths, including terrorism, which he has denied. Prosecutors also say that while he was in detention he directed the deaths of 52 people in Kwa Binzaro village, about 18 miles from Shakahola. He has pleaded not guilty in that case, which, along with the unresolved 200-plus deaths, is what remains to be tested in court.