A notorious Kenyan cult leader named Paul Mackenzie was sentenced to 200 years in prison for actions that led directly to the deaths of hundreds of people, most of them children.
The High Court in Kenya’s coastal city of Mombasa issued the sentence for Pastor Paul Mackenzie. He was convicted of murdering 190 children and one adult after he ordered his followers to starve themselves to death in order to meet Jesus.
Justice Diana Kavedza said that Mackenzie, leader of the Good News International Church, bore the “primary criminal culpability” for relocating his followers to a remote location and ordering them to fast to death.
Mackenzie was charged with the murders alongside 28 of his followers, including guards who enforced his fasting directives and gravediggers who helped conceal the mass graves. All denied the charges, except for one person who confessed and pleaded for leniency.
The cult fell apart when a few members fled from the forest site where Mackenzie and his followers were living back in 2023 and informed police they'd been ordered to starve themselves to death. Police then began exhuming dozens of bodies from mass graves found at the site:
Police near the coastal town of Malindi started exhuming bodies on Friday from the Shakahola forest.
"In total, 47 people have died at the Shakahola forest," detective Charles Kamau told Reuters on Sunday. The exhumations were still ongoing, Kamau said.
Earlier this month, police rescued 15 members of the group -- worshippers at the Good News International Church -- who they said had been told to starve themselves to death. Four of them died before they reached hospital, police said.
Eventually, 429 bodies were found, though additional bodies have been discovered as recently as last year. These appear to have been buried since the exhumations that took place in 2023:
Nine bodies have been exhumed from fresh graves suspected to be linked to Kenya's notorious starvation cult.
In one of the worst ever cases of cult-related mass deaths, more than 400 bodies were found in 2023 in the remote Shakahola Forest, inland from the coastal town of Malindi...
The latest discoveries seem to confirm fears raised by the government earlier in the year that the cult might still be active.
In April, Interior Minister Kipchumba Murkomen said there were allegations that Mr Mackenzie was actively communicating with his followers from jail - using a mobile phone.
Why is a man responsible for more than 430 deaths still breathing? That's because there is no death penalty in Kenya. It runs a bit like California.
Capital punishment has been a legal penalty in Kenya since before its independence, and continues to be so under Kenyan law. No executions have been carried out in Kenya since 1987...
Presidents have on occasion commuted all death sentences to life imprisonment, and thereby releasing all inmates from death row, most recently in 2016. There is no current policy to abolish the death penalty.
So Mackenzie could have faced the death penalty in Kenya, but in reality it would only have resulted in a life sentence. Here's a BBC report about the sentencing and the cult.