Kenyan Court Convicts Doomsday Cult Leader Paul Mackenzie of 191 Murders in Shakahola Starvation Case

A High Court in Mombasa convicted self-proclaimed pastor Paul Mackenzie and 28 followers on Monday of murdering 191 people, nearly all of them children, who died of starvation at his forest compound on Kenya's coast in what prosecutors called a "structured hierarchy of death" imposed on members of his doomsday church.

Justice Diana Rachel Kavedza-Mochache, who has presided over the case since it moved to the Mombasa Law Courts, found all 29 accused guilty on every count, rejecting a defence argument that the victims had starved themselves voluntarily in pursuit of their faith. Al Jazeera reported that the court was "satisfied that the prosecution has proved the case against all the 29 accused persons," closing the evidentiary phase of a prosecution that has run, in various forms, for more than three years.

The case has drawn international attention since the first graves were found in 2023, both for its scale, among the largest cult-related death tolls documented anywhere in recent decades, and for what it exposed about gaps in Kenya's oversight of religious organisations, which face little formal regulation under current law. Monday's verdict is the first time a Kenyan court has returned findings of guilt over the deaths themselves, after earlier proceedings produced convictions only on unrelated, lesser charges.

The numbers behind the verdict

The 191 deaths at issue in this trial, 190 children and one adult, are only part of a larger toll. Bodies began turning up in shallow mass graves in the Shakahola forest in Kilifi County in April 2023, after police acting on a tip-off raided an 800-acre ranch belonging to Mackenzie's Good News International Church. Kenyan investigators have since linked the site, and a second one at nearby Kwa Binzaro, to hundreds more deaths, and Kenya's national human rights commission documented 448 deaths overall in a 2024 report that also recorded more than 600 missing people, most of whose remains have never been positively identified. Monday's judgment deals only with the 191 counts that Kenya's Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions was able to bring to trial; other cases, including one tied to 429 further deaths, are still working through Kenya's courts.

One of the 29 defendants, Enos Amanya, who went by the name "Hallelujah," had already pleaded guilty to all 191 counts earlier this year and was convicted on his own admission. His sentencing, like Mackenzie's, is now pending.

Starvation as doctrine

According to Capital FM's courtroom account, prosecutors told the court that Mackenzie "initiated and directed" extreme fasting at the ranch, instructing followers that starving to death, children first, then teenagers, then women, then men, was the path to meeting Jesus before an imminent apocalypse. The defence argued the deaths were the product of voluntary religious devotion rather than a directed killing, a line the court rejected outright in its judgment.

Mackenzie, a former taxi driver turned preacher, had built a following over more than a decade and had been arrested at least twice before on related complaints, only to be released each time. His only prior conviction, in 2023, was for running an unlicensed film studio and distributing unclassified material, not for any killing, a mismatch between the scale of what investigators were hearing about and the charges that had, until now, actually stuck.

The slow pace of the investigation has been a recurring source of frustration. Hundreds of recovered bodies have remained in a mortuary in Malindi for years while forensic teams worked through DNA testing to identify them, a process repeatedly delayed by shortages of testing reagents and by the sheer number of remains involved. Kenyan rights groups, including the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights, have pressed the government for years to speed up both the exhumations and the identification process so that grieving families can finally bury their dead.

Warnings that went unanswered

The verdict lands hardest in the villages around Shakahola and Malindi, where families spent much of the past three years waiting for identification of remains recovered from the forest and from a hospital mortuary in Malindi where hundreds of bodies have been held. Francis Wanje, 62, who lost eight family members including two grandchildren, told reporters the loss had caused lasting damage well beyond grief.

"It has really taken us very far in terms of psychological problems," Wanje said, describing the loss as "a heavy thing" for his family.

Kenya's Commission on Administrative Justice, the national ombudsman, concluded in an earlier investigation that local administrators and police had received specific reports about Mackenzie's activities between 2021 and 2023 and failed to act on them, naming several officials it said should face disciplinary proceedings. President William Ruto apologised publicly in the aftermath, calling the deaths something that should never have happened, and swore in both a judicial commission of inquiry and a presidential task force to review the laws governing religious organisations in Kenya. That task force submitted its report in 2024; legislation to tighten oversight of churches and other religious groups has moved slowly since, and no comprehensive new regulatory framework has yet passed into law.

The push for tighter regulation has not gone unopposed. Several church umbrella bodies objected at the time to being bypassed in the task force's composition, while others said they would support new rules against cult-like practices only if any law protected the broader right to religious freedom. That tension, between preventing a repeat of Shakahola and avoiding state overreach into religious life, has shaped, and slowed, Kenya's legislative response ever since.

What happens next

Probation officers have been ordered to prepare individual pre-sentence reports on each of the 29 convicts, due back in court by October 30, after which defence lawyers will make mitigation submissions. Justice Kavedza-Mochache has set November 6 for sentencing, with the convicts to be produced in open court; 68 victim impact statements already taken during the trial will not need to be repeated. Murder convictions in Kenya can carry the death penalty or life imprisonment, though death sentences have not been carried out in the country in decades and are routinely commuted.

Mackenzie and several co-accused still face separate, ongoing proceedings over additional deaths at Kwa Binzaro and over terrorism and radicalisation charges tied to the same church, meaning Monday's verdict closes one chapter of the Shakahola case rather than the whole of it. For families still waiting on the identification of relatives' remains, and for a government still weighing how far to go in regulating unlicensed churches, the reckoning over what happened in the forest is not yet complete.