Justice finally walked out of the Shakahola forest. A Kenyan court has found doomsday preacher Paul Mackenzie guilty of murdering 191 people, all but one of them children, the BBC reported Monday.
Mackenzie ordered his followers to starve their children to death so they could “meet Jesus.” His sermons called education “evil” and modern medicine against the doctrine. Twenty-eight other cult leaders were convicted of murder alongside him. They all pleaded not guilty and kept insisting nobody was forced to die. The court didn’t buy it.
Justice Diana Mochache read an eight-hour judgment in Mombasa. She said followers saw Mackenzie as “Jesus’s mouthpiece,” and that in some cases children were isolated and denied food while their parents watched, the Guardian reported. Burials in the forest were called “weddings.” One co-accused testified that anyone who resisted the fast was to be “forced to go to heaven through kicks and blows.”
The scale is staggering. More than 400 bodies have been dug out of shallow graves since 2023, and only 26 have been identified. Monday’s verdict covered 191 deaths; investigations into the rest continue. Stephen Mwiti, who lost all six of his children, told the BBC: “I’m a happy man, that all persons have been convicted.”
And here’s the question that still stings: police searched Mackenzie’s premises back in 2017, and his church was shut in 2019 before he moved into the forest. Sentencing is set for Nov. 6, and he still faces separate terrorism and radicalisation cases.
Sources: BBC — Kenya cult leader who told parents to starve children guilty of 191 murders (Oct. 19, 2026) · The Guardian — Kenyan starvation cult leader guilty of murder of 190 children and one adult (Oct. 19, 2026)
Featured image: AI-generated editorial illustration by Bugle Blast.
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