By asahifile 
A Kenyan court has convicted the leader of a doomsday cult of murdering 191 people, all but one of them children, in the starvation deaths that became known as the Shakahola Forest massacre. Paul Nthenge Mackenzie and 28 co-accused were found guilty at the High Court in Mombasa on Monday after an eight-hour judgment by Justice Diana Kavedza Mochache.
“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,” the judge said. Sentencing is set for 6 November.
What the court found
Mackenzie’s followers were taught that education was forbidden and modern medicine “evil”, and that fasting to death was the way to “meet Jesus”. Prosecutors said he “initiated and directed” extreme fasting at his 325-hectare ranch in Shakahola Forest, inland from the coastal town of Malindi, through what they described as a structured hierarchy of death: children first, then teenagers, women, and men.
The court heard that the order to fast travelled through village elders, was reinforced at regular meetings, and was enforced. One co-accused said Mackenzie told followers that anyone who “resisted the directive to fast must be forced to go to heaven through kicks and blows”. A witness described a pregnant follower barred from nursing her newborn, who died 12 days later; the mother was then told to fast to death and follow her children. Burials in the forest were reportedly celebrated as “weddings with Jesus”.
Medical evidence was messier than the verdict. A prosecution witness produced 190 post-mortem samples from dead minors, and the prosecution attributed 76 deaths to starvation, 112 to unascertained causes, one to traumatic head injury, one to manual neck compression and one to asphyxia with features of starvation. Many of the dead remain unidentified because of decomposition; court documents refer to some as “unknown male child”, identified only by grave location and discovery date.
A toll far larger than the charges
Mackenzie was arrested in April 2023 after a rights group tipped off authorities and some followers were rescued. The police operation that followed exposed hundreds of shallow graves; more than 400 bodies have been exhumed, and the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights put the death toll at 429 in 2024, with hundreds of people still missing. Excavations were paused at one point because local morgues ran out of space. In January 2026 he was charged over a further 52 bodies found at a nearby village.
This is the first verdict Mackenzie has faced on murder charges. He still faces separate cases involving terrorism, radicalisation and denying children an education, and he has denied those charges. He was arrested in 2017 on radicalisation charges and acquitted, and again in 2019 over two child deaths at Shakahola, when he was released on bail.
The regulatory questions the verdict leaves open
The conviction closes one case, not the wider failure. Mackenzie built a following through a television channel, Times TV, broadcasting end-times sermons before he led people into the forest — and the state’s earlier encounters with him ended in an acquittal and a bail release. Kenya has since faced demands for tighter oversight of religious organisations, and the practical problem is that coercion inside a closed community is hard to prove before people die.
Survivors complicate the story further. Some followers still defend him; one told the BBC that Mackenzie was “a good person who cares for me”. Identifying victims, accounting for the missing, and determining what, if anything, families can claim are all unresolved.
What to watch
- The sentence on 6 November, and whether the court treats the 190 child victims as an aggravating factor.
- The separate terrorism and radicalisation prosecutions, and the case over the 52 bodies found nearby.
- Any appeal, and whether the defence’s “voluntary fasting” argument is revisited on review.
- Whether Kenya advances legislation to register and supervise religious organisations.
- Progress on identifying the remaining victims and supporting survivors who remain loyal to the movement.
Sources: BBC News; Africanews; Eastern Herald; Al Jazeera.