A court in Mombasa, Kenya, on Monday found self-proclaimed pastor Paul Mackenzie guilty of murdering 191 people, nearly all of them children, in the starvation deaths that shocked the country when mass graves were uncovered in the Shakahola forest in 2023. Twenty-eight of his co-defendants were convicted alongside him.
Delivering an eight-hour judgment, Justice Diana Mochache said Mackenzie's followers believed he was "Jesus's mouthpiece," and that he had ordered members of his Good News International Ministries to starve themselves and their children so they could "meet Jesus." Burials inside the forest were referred to within the cult as "weddings," the judge said, with those who died "celebrated as having wedded with Jesus."
A Death Toll That Kept Climbing
Kenyan police began digging in the Shakahola forest, roughly 70 kilometers from the coastal city of Malindi, after a tip in early 2023 about missing relatives. They eventually recovered more than 400 bodies from shallow graves, most of them children, some bound hand and foot or bearing signs of strangulation and blunt trauma. Al Jazeera reports that 429 deaths have been linked to the case in total, including followers who died later in hospital, with hundreds more still listed as missing.
One of the seventeen local men hired to exhume the graves, identified only as James, described the scale of what they found: "Every grave we found had at least three bodies," he said. "Some of the remains were of children as young as a few weeks old." Another gravedigger, Salim Karisa, said the operation was carried out with chilling discretion: "It was so planned and secretive that nobody could tell what was happening inside."
From Taxi Driver to 'Spiritual Father'
Mackenzie, a former Nairobi taxi driver, founded Good News International Ministries with his wife in the coastal city of Malindi in 2003. Over 16 years it grew into a church with thousands of followers and its own television station, Times TV, which broadcast his apocalyptic sermons condemning modern medicine, formal schooling and digital identity documents as tools of the devil. Peter Shukrani, who joined the church at age eight and was later rescued from the forest, said his mother "would throw away all the medicine I was supposed to take because she believed that only God could heal me." "I would have died," he said, "if I wasn't rescued from Shakahola forest."
The church's headquarters shut down in 2019 under official pressure, and Mackenzie relocated his remaining followers to the forest, where they lived scattered across mud houses, fasting for days at a time. Authorities say he instructed that children be starved first, followed by unmarried women, then men, and finally the church's own leaders.
Mackenzie was arrested in 2023 and formally charged with 191 counts of murder the following year. His former head of security, Enos Amanya Ngala, struck a plea deal and testified for the prosecution. Mackenzie and his co-defendants had pleaded not guilty throughout the trial, arguing that the deaths alone did not establish their criminal liability.
Grief, Relief and What Comes Next
Outside the courthouse, Stephen Mwiti, who said he lost all six of his children to the cult along with his former wife — who was herself convicted Monday — called the verdict a measure of justice. "I'm a happy man, that all persons have been convicted," he told the BBC, saying he had only recovered the remains of one son, Samuel.
Mackenzie is due to be sentenced on November 6. He and his associates still face a separate set of charges over terrorism, radicalizing followers and denying children an education, and prosecutors have said he is suspected of involvement in dozens more deaths among followers he allegedly continued to recruit by letter from his prison cell. The case has prompted renewed scrutiny in Kenya of how authorities oversee unregistered churches, after years in which Mackenzie's sermons and television broadcasts drew official complaints with little consequence before the Shakahola graves were ever found.
