Kenyan Preacher Convicted of 191 Murders, Nearly All Children
Paul Mackenzie, who led a church in the south-east of the country, has been convicted in Mombasa of murdering 191 people, all but one of them children. Twenty-eight other leaders were convicted alongside him. All had pleaded not guilty, insisting nobody was forced to die. More than 400 bodies have been recovered in total and only 26 identified.
Justice Diana Kavedza Mochache delivered an eight-hour judgment finding that followers believed Mackenzie was “Jesus’s mouthpiece”. His teaching forbade education and described modern medicine as evil. One co-accused said he had told followers that anyone who “resisted the directive to fast must be forced to go to heaven through kicks and blows”. Burials in the forest were called weddings, and the dead “were celebrated as having wedded with Jesus”. A witness described a pregnant woman forbidden to nurse her newborn, who died twelve days later; she was then “instructed to fast to death and follow her children”. The scale is still not established. Mackenzie was arrested in 2023 after a police tip-off and bodies were exhumed from shallow graves in the Shakahola forest near the coast; Monday’s judgment covers 191 of them and investigations into the rest continue. No sentencing date has been given. The identification problem is the part that will outlast the trial: four hundred bodies, twenty-six names.