A Kenyan court has sentenced doomsday cult leader Paul Nthenge Mackenzie to 200 years in prison for the murder of 191 people, most of them children, who died after being ordered to starve themselves to death at his remote settlement in Shakahola Forest. The sentence, handed down by the High Court in the coastal city of Mombasa on Friday, is one of the longest ever imposed in Kenya and closes the sentencing phase of a case that has haunted the country since hundreds of bodies were dug out of shallow graves in 2023.
Justice Diana Kavedza imposed two separate 100-year terms on Mackenzie, 50, the leader of the Good News International Church. The first covered 183 counts of murder by starvation, involving 182 children and one adult, with the sentences running concurrently. The second covered eight counts of murder by direct homicide, involving children who were suffocated, strangled or beaten to death. The judge directed that the two sets of sentences run consecutively, producing an aggregate term of 200 years.
Delivering the sentence, Justice Kavedza said the Shakahola massacre was premeditated and sustained over a prolonged period, and that the punishment had to reflect the gravity of the crimes. She placed Mackenzie at the centre of the killings, describing him as the principal architect of the massacre in his capacity as leader of the church and the Shakahola settlement, and said he bore the primary criminal culpability for moving his followers to a remote location and ordering them to fast to death.
Mackenzie was convicted on 19 October alongside 28 of his followers, including guards who enforced his fasting orders and gravediggers who helped conceal the mass graves. The 28 co-accused were also sentenced on Friday, receiving terms ranging from 10 to 160 years. Fifteen of them were jailed for 160 years each, ten received 140 years, one was given 100 years, and two men, Enos Amanya Ngala and Lucas Owino, received 10 years each. Mackenzie's deputy, Smart Mwakalama, was among those handed 160 years.
The deaths took place between January 2021 and September 2023 at Shakahola Forest in Kilifi County, near the coastal town of Malindi. Prosecutors said Mackenzie convinced his followers that starving themselves and their children would allow them to meet Jesus before the end of the world, and that he ordered them to abandon conventional schools, hospitals and religious institutions. The court found that he radicalised members of his church through teachings that promoted an extreme belief system and enforced the fasting regime with violence and deprivation.
The case came to international attention in April 2023, when Kenyan police began recovering human remains from the forest. By the time the search was completed, 448 bodies had been exhumed from shallow graves on the 320-hectare Chakama Ranch, where Mackenzie's followers lived in mud huts away from the scrutiny of local communities. The convictions handed down in October covered 191 of those deaths; the wider Shakahola investigations continue, and Mackenzie also faces a separate case over the alleged deaths of 52 people found at another location about 30 kilometres away, which would bring the suspected total toll to around 500.
Prosecutors built their case on evidence from 123 witnesses, along with medical reports, DNA analysis, digital recordings and other forensic material, according to Kenya's Directorate of Criminal Investigations. The prosecution had argued for the death penalty for Mackenzie and life imprisonment for his accomplices. Although Kenyan law still provides for the death penalty, the country has not carried out an execution since 1987, and the court instead imposed the consecutive century-long terms.
The human cost of the tragedy was laid bare in the accounts of bereaved families. Stephen Mwiti, 48, the father of six of Mackenzie's child victims, said his wife had taken the children to Shakahola, where they were starved to death. His wife was among those convicted alongside Mackenzie. During the sentencing hearing, Mackenzie was reported to have smiled and chatted with his assistant pastor as the terms were read out.
Mackenzie's lawyer, Lawrence Obonyo, who represents Mackenzie and almost all of the other convicted defendants, said the defence team would appeal against the judgement. Any appeal would revisit both the convictions, handed down in October, and the sentences imposed on Friday, and could take months or longer to work through Kenya's courts.
The sentencing brings a measure of closure to a case that exposed serious failures in oversight of religious groups in Kenya and prompted a national reckoning over how fringe preachers operate beyond the reach of the authorities. Mackenzie had registered the Good News International Church as a religious society in 2020, serving as its chairman. For the families of the victims, the 200-year term is the fullest punishment the court could impose short of the death penalty, but questions remain over the hundreds of other bodies recovered from Shakahola whose deaths were not covered by this trial, and over the separate case still to come.
