A court in Mombasa, Kenya, on Monday found Paul Mackenzie, a self-proclaimed pastor, guilty of murdering 191 people. All but one were children, and they starved to death in the Shakahola Forest so that, his followers were told, they could “meet Jesus.”
Before the hearing, Al Jazeera described it as the first judgment in the “doomsday” cult case. Justice Diana Kavedza of the Mombasa High Court took more than eight hours to read the ruling. Mr. Mackenzie and his co-accused were convicted on all 191 murder counts, which cover deaths between January 2021 and September 2023. Reports disagree on how many people were convicted with him. CNN reported that 29 others were found guilty. The Kenyan news site Kahawatungu put the total at 29, Mr. Mackenzie and 28 co-accused, and said two defendants had died during the trial.
Among those convicted were Smart Deri Mwakalama, Mr. Mackenzie’s deputy pastor, and Stephen Sanga Muye. Mr. Mackenzie sat in court beside his wife, who was also a defendant. Relatives of some of the dead came to hear the verdict.
Mr. Mackenzie had denied the charges and said he did not force anyone to starve. The judge rejected that defense. She said that in some cases children were isolated and refused food while their parents watched.
She ruled that the Good News International Church, which Mr. Mackenzie founded in 2010, operated as a cult. Its members were first drawn in through its religious and communications network, and then sent to a settlement in the forest that was divided into 12 villages, Justice Kavedza said.
“They were subsequently directed to relocate,” she said. “Once at the settlement, they were directed to fast.”
The court found that village elders passed the fasting orders down, starting with the children. Guards stopped followers from leaving, and bodies were buried at odd hours so that no one would notice. Survivors have said that under Mr. Mackenzie’s orders the children were to starve first, then unmarried women, then men, and the church’s leaders last.
The medical evidence was less clear-cut than the charge sheet. According to Kahawatungu’s account of the judgment, 76 of the deaths were attributed to starvation and 112 had causes that could not be determined. One person died of a traumatic head injury, one of manual compression of the neck and one of asphyxia with signs of starvation.
Prosecutors led by Renson Ingonga, the director of public prosecutions, relied on postmortem samples from 190 children, DNA analysis, digital recordings, journals recovered from the dead and two burial sites, one holding 12 bodies and the other 63. Kahawatungu put the number of prosecution witnesses at 123. Other accounts put it at 121. Defense lawyers had argued that the case rested largely on circumstantial evidence, hearsay and inconclusive forensic findings.
The 191 deaths are a fraction of the toll. More than 400 bodies have been recovered from the Shakahola Forest, many of them badly decomposed, and only 26 have been identified, CNN reported. Investigations into the other deaths are continuing.
Mr. Mackenzie still faces other prosecutions. In February, a court charged him over 52 more deaths with organized criminal activity, radicalization and facilitating terrorism.
The judgment had been due on Oct. 16 and was pushed back to Monday, when Mr. Mackenzie and his co-defendants were brought to the Mombasa High Court to hear it. No sentencing date had been reported by Monday evening.