Kenyan cult leader guilty of ordering followers to starve their children to death

Doomsday cult leader Paul Mackenzie, his wife Rhoda Maweu, and 29 other co-accused have been found guilty of the murder of 190 children and one adult.

Justice Diana Mochache handed down the judgment at the Mombasa Law Courts on Monday - in one of the world's worst cult-related disasters in recent history.

At the end of a long day and her 1,000-page judgement, she asked each of the accused to stand and read out their name, adding, "convicted on all 191 counts of murder".

She found that followers of Mackenzie's Good News International Church (GNI) had been stripped of their independence long before they moved to the Shakahola Forest, where since 2023 authorities found hundreds of bodies in shallow graves.

The church had branches across Kenya and recruited followers from all over the country.

"By the time they were relocating to Shakahola, many of them had lost their sense of self," she said.

"Their self-trust had been eroded and most of them felt helpless and dependent on his every whim and directive. The victims had lost their personal boundaries. They could do nothing without consulting Mackenzie."

Following the conviction, Dan Mackenzie, the cult leader's son, said he was relieved that justice had been achieved.

The judge said followers had become so emotionally dependent on him that when he banned them from vaccinating their children and demanded that they give up formal or any other employment, "they obeyed without question".

She also found that the children could not consent to fasting to death, as they lacked the legal capacity to make an informed decision. Many of the children were aged between six and 10, with the youngest just a few months old.

Justice Mochache rejected the idea that the move to the forest was simply the result of Mackenzie's powers of persuasion.

"The relocation to Shakahola Forest was therefore not just inspired by his eloquence and power of persuasion, but by his full participation and supervision," she said.

She found that the teachings of Mackenzie and his associate pastors led followers to adopt an extreme belief system that rejected all government policies and violated basic human rights. It ultimately led to the deaths of 429 people, of whom 191 were the subject of the charges before the court.

Prosecutors argued that Mackenzie ordered his followers to starve themselves and their children to death so they could go to heaven before the end of the world and "meet Jesus".

They said he "initiated and directed" extreme fasting at his 800-acre ranch in the Shakahola Forest.

There was a "structured hierarchy of death" under which children should die first, followed by teenagers, women, and then men.

The children mostly died from starvation, but also from "asphyxia, neck compression and traumatic head injury", prosecutors said.

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All 31 defendants had denied the charges, but all were found guilty of murder. Their sentence will be handed down in November.

Former taxi driver Mackenzie was arrested in April 2023, after a rights group tipped off authorities and some followers were rescued.

The police operation exposed hundreds of shallow mass graves.

A total of 102 different body parts were also found, with the bodies buried in graves less than a foot deep.

There were so many bodies that local morgues ran out of space and exhumations had to be paused.

The Kenya National Commission on Human Rights said in 2024 that the official death toll was 429. Many were severely decomposed, with only 26 bodies able to be identified.

Last month the Kenyan government directed the families of the Shakahola victims to either pick up the bodies of their loved ones or have them buried in mass graves.

Francis Wanje, 62, who ⁠lost eight family members including two grandchildren to the cult, said before the verdict: "It has been really a heavy thing for us as a family, and it has really taken us very far in terms of psychological ‌problems."

Mackenzie also faces charges of terrorism-related crimes, manslaughter and torture. In January this year, he was further charged with the murder of another 52 people found dead at a nearby village. He also pleaded not guilty in that case.

There have been calls in Kenya for tougher regulations on religious organisations after it emerged that Mackenzie had been arrested twice in the past but released.

Kenyan President William Ruto said in 2023 that government agencies should have been able to prevent the deaths and that he took responsibility as leader.

(c) Sky News 2026: Kenyan cult leader guilty of ordering followers to starve their children to death