Kenya court set to rule in Shakahola cult starvation deaths trial

A court in Mombasa is due to deliver its verdict on Monday in the long-running trial over the deaths in Kenya's Shakahola forest. Paul Nthenge Mackenzie, the self-proclaimed pastor who led the Good News International church, faces 191 counts of murder, manslaughter and terrorism, charges he denies. Thirty co-accused are on trial with him, and the state argues they acted with a common purpose and that the children who died as a result of fasting could not have consented.

The case opened in March 2023, when a man told police that relatives who had joined a new church had not come home. Searches around the Shakahola forest near the coastal town of Malindi uncovered hundreds of shallow graves. Some people were found alive after the alert was raised, but hundreds more remain missing.

Families are still searching for the dead. Elizabeth Dzidza Mwatsuma was identified through DNA profiling more than three years after she disappeared into the forest, and her relative Alice Mwajuma Deche was finally able to bury her in May. Deche, 66, said she has 11 more relatives to find, having lost two children and 10 grandchildren. Francis Wanje, a teacher, found his eight-year-old grandson in the forest on 17 March 2023 and he became the first survivor to come out of Shakahola; the boy's two younger siblings had starved to death, and the family has buried only four of the eight relatives it lost.

By October 2023 a Kenyan senate inquiry had recorded 428 exhumed bodies, plus one suspect who died in custody, and later exhumations brought the total recovered to 446. Of the 443 bodies and body parts held at the Malindi mortuary, only 34 have been positively identified through DNA matching. Kilifi County health official Peter Mwarogo said some families traced their relatives but refused to collect the remains because of stigma. Families have until mid-October to claim remains; unclaimed bodies will be buried by December at a court-approved site near Shakahola, with graves arranged so the dead can still be identified later. Interior Cabinet Secretary Kipchumba Murkomen said identification has been slowed by the condition of the remains and difficulties getting DNA reference samples from relatives.

Differing accounts of what happened emerged during the trial. One accused, Steven Sanga Muye, testified that people lived in Shakahola voluntarily and that fasting instructions came from the Holy Spirit rather than Mackenzie, while another co-accused, Lucas Owino Ogola, said he was forced to fast and was assaulted for refusing. Steven Ngugi testified in April that he helped dig graves and bury the dead in good faith as a community member, saying the deaths were treated as spiritual rather than medical events and that the group used weddings as a coded term for them, according to the prosecution office. Mackenzie and dozens of other suspects also face separate, untried charges including child cruelty, torture and denial of education.