Preacher Paul Nthenge Mackenzie has been sentenced to 200 years in prison by the High Court in Mombasa, on Kenya's coast, for the deaths of 191 people — 190 children and one adult — in the Shakahola forest. Justice Diana Kavedza read the sentence on Friday, about a month after the court found Mackenzie and 28 co-accused guilty.
The deaths took place between January 2021 and September 2023 in the Malindi sub-county of Kilifi County. Mackenzie led the Good News International Church, a Christian doomsday sect that preached that followers and their children should stop eating and die before the end of the world, and so "meet Jesus".
How the sentence was calculated
The judge split the 200 years into two consecutive terms: 100 years for murder by starvation and 100 years for direct homicide. The 28 others convicted also received prison terms.
The Director of Public Prosecutions had asked for the death penalty, arguing that the scale, brutality and circumstances of the killings warranted the harshest punishment available under Kenyan law. The court chose imprisonment instead.
The defence denied the murders. Mackenzie argued that he had forced no one to fast — a version the court rejected, finding it proven that aides threatened and beat those who resisted.
More than 400 deaths and two earlier arrests
Mackenzie was arrested in 2023 after a tip-off. Weeks later, teams began recovering bodies from shallow graves and latrines in the Shakahola forest, in the south-east of the country. Some of the victims, according to the authorities, were buried alive.
The figure of 191 covers only the charges brought to trial in this case. The Kenyan government estimates that more than 400 people died in the episode as a whole — placing it among the deadliest cult-linked massacres of recent decades, behind the Ugandan case of 2000, with more than 700 dead, and the 1978 Jonestown massacre in Guyana, with more than 900.
Before 2023, Mackenzie had been arrested twice and released both times. That point, more than the sentence, is what sustains the debate now open in the country: why the state did not stop the group earlier, and what kind of oversight can be applied to religious organisations without becoming control of worship.
With information from Al Jazeera and the Kenyan newspaper The Star.
