Kenya Cult Leader Paul Mackenzie Sentenced to 200 Years Over Shakahola Deaths
MOMBASA, Kenya — A Kenyan court on Friday sentenced doomsday preacher Paul Mackenzie to 200 years in prison for the murders of 191 people, 190 of them children, who were starved to death or killed on his orders in the Shakahola forest.
High Court Justice Diana Kavedza handed down the sentence in Mombasa, closing the main trial in one of the worst mass killings of modern times. Mackenzie, the founder of the Good News International Church, was convicted on October 19 alongside 28 co-accused on all 191 counts of murder.
Two consecutive 100-year terms
The 200-year sentence is made up of two consecutive terms: 100 years for murder by starvation and a further 100 years for direct homicide. Mackenzie, 50, will spend the rest of his life behind bars.
Of the 191 victims covered by the trial, 183 died from enforced starvation — 182 children and one adult — while the other eight, all children, were suffocated, strangled or beaten to death, Reuters reported.
His assistant pastor, Smart Mwakalama, received 160 years, while the other co-accused — many of whom starved their own children to death — received a variety of lengthy prison terms.
Prosecutors had sought the death penalty, but Justice Kavedza declined it, saying it could strengthen the convicts’ belief that dying would reunite them with Jesus. Kenya has carried out no execution since 1987.
The Shakahola forest deaths
Mackenzie, a former taxi driver, founded the Good News International Church in 2003 and preached that the world would end in August 2023. He told his followers they needed to fast in order to “meet Jesus” and reach heaven, moving them to a remote settlement in Shakahola Forest, in Kilifi County near the coastal town of Malindi, after his church there was shut down in 2019.
The tragedy came to international attention in April 2023, when police began uncovering bodies in shallow graves across the forest. The Kenya National Commission on Human Rights counts 448 bodies recovered from Shakahola, although only 191 deaths were covered by the murder trial, with authorities citing around 500 suspected victims in total.
The scale of the case drew comparisons with other cult tragedies: more than 700 people died in a Ugandan doomsday cult in 2000, and more than 900 died at Jonestown in Guyana in 1978.
Cases still to come
The sentence is not the end of Mackenzie’s legal troubles. He also faces a separate case involving 52 deaths at another location, about 30 kilometres from Shakahola, as well as terrorism and radicalisation charges. Kenyan outlet Khusoko reported that the ruling closes the main trial but leaves further proceedings still before the courts.
The question of capital punishment remains contested elsewhere too. In the United States, California commuted all 548 death sentences on its death row to life without parole, while three executions in a single day were carried out this week in Indiana, Florida and Alabama.
For the families of the Shakahola victims, Friday’s sentence brings a measure of closure to a case that has haunted Kenya for more than three years. The full toll of the forest may never be known, but the court has now established criminal responsibility for 191 murders — and the man behind them will never walk free.
