Doomsday cult leader learns fate for murders of 190 children

The High Court in Kenya's coastal city of Mombasa issued the sentence for Pastor Paul Mackenzie, who bore the "primary criminal culpability" for relocating his followers to a remote location and ordering them to fast to death. Justice Diana Kavedza determined that 183 victims died of starvation, while eight were classified as murder by direct homicide.

Mass graves discovery

In 2023, more than 400 bodies were exhumed from shallow graves on the 800-acre Chakama Ranch in coastal Kilifi County, where Mackenzie's followers lived in mud huts. The Kenya National Commission on Human Rights later confirmed the death toll at 429, though many victims remain unidentified and unclaimed.

The case came to light after a rights group tipped off authorities in April 2023, leading to Mackenzie's arrest and the rescue of some followers. Subsequent police operations exposed hundreds of shallow graves, with the soaring death toll requiring a pause in excavations as local morgues ran out of space.

Cult's deadly doctrine

Mackenzie established the Good News International Church in 2003 and set up branches in Nairobi and along Kenya's coast that attracted thousands of devotees. Followers have told officials they believed his preaching that starvation was the path to salvation, with members split into smaller groups assigned biblical names.

Legal aftermath

Mackenzie was charged alongside 28 of his followers, including guards who enforced fasting directives and gravediggers who helped conceal the mass graves. All denied the charges except for one person who confessed and pleaded for leniency. On Oct. 19, the court found all 29 guilty of the murder of 191 people.

The prosecution had argued for the death penalty for Mackenzie and life imprisonment for his accomplices. However, during sentencing, Mackenzie often smiled and chatted with his assistant pastor Smart Mwakalama, who received 160 years. Mackenzie is also facing terrorism, child abuse and torture charges in two other courts.

Kavedza dismissed claims by some defendants that losing their own children altered their culpability, noting the perpetrators showed no remorse and declared they were ready to fast to death themselves. The justice described the killings as "cold and calculated."