Kenyan cult pastor who starved 190 children to death gets 200 years

A Kenyan court threw the book at doomsday cult leader Paul Mackenzie on Friday, sentencing him to 200 years behind bars for the murders of 191 people — 190 of them children. The High Court in the coastal city of Mombasa convicted him of ordering his followers to starve themselves to death so they could meet Jesus.

Justice Diana Kavedza pinned the blame squarely on Mackenzie, leader of the Good News International Church, saying he carried the primary criminal culpability for moving his flock to a remote patch of land and telling them to fast until they died. She called the killings cold and calculated, and noted the perpetrators showed no remorse — some even declared they were ready to fast to death themselves. Mackenzie spent much of the hearing smiling and chatting with his assistant pastor, Smart Mwakalama, who was handed 160 years.

The court drew a grim line between the deaths: 183 victims starved, defined as a complete lack of food, while the other eight were killed by direct homicide. Mackenzie was charged alongside 28 followers, including guards who enforced his fasting orders and gravediggers who hid the bodies. All denied the charges except one, who confessed and begged for leniency. On Oct. 19, the court found all 29 guilty.

The scale of the horror surfaced in 2023, when more than 400 bodies were pulled from shallow graves on the 800-acre Chakama Ranch in Kilifi County, where followers lived in mud huts far from the eyes of authorities. Relatives identified and reburied more than 60 of the dead; many more remain unidentified and unclaimed. The Kenya National Commission on Human Rights put the toll at 429 in 2024, and the digging was even paused at one point because local morgues ran out of space.

Francis Wanje, a 62-year-old teacher who lost two grandchildren, told AFP he had wanted a death sentence to stop anything like this from happening again. Nothing can ease the pain, he said, turning his anger on the authorities: if they had acted sooner, he argued, families would not be mourning today. The prosecution had pushed for the death penalty for Mackenzie and life imprisonment for his accomplices.

Mackenzie still faces terrorism, child abuse and torture charges in two other courts. He founded the church in 2003, building branches in Nairobi and along Kenya's coast that drew thousands before he claimed it closed in 2019. He was arrested over radicalization in 2017 and acquitted, then arrested again in 2019 over two child deaths at Shakahola and released on bail — until a rights group's tip-off in April 2023 finally triggered the raid that exposed the graves.