The leader of a Kenyan doomsday cult, Paul Mackenzie, has been found guilty of mVrdering 191 people, all but one of them children
Mackenzie ordered members of his cult to starve their children to d.eath so they could “meet Jesus”.
His doctrine said that education was forbidden and modern medicine was “evil”.
Twenty-eight other leaders of his cult were also convicted of mVrder. They had all pleaded not guilty, repeatedly insisting that nobody was forced to d!e.
Delivering her eight-hour judgement in the port city of Mombasa, Justice Diana Mochache said Mackenzie’s followers believed he was “Jesus’s mouthpiece”.
One of his co-accused said Mackenzie had told his followers that anyone who “resisted the directive to fast must be forced to go to heaven through kicks and blows”.
Burials inside the forest where the cult was based were called “weddings”. Those who d!ed “were celebrated as having wedded with Jesus”, the judge said.
One witness stated that a pregnant woman had been barred from nursing her new-born baby, who d!ed 12 days later. “She was instructed to fast to d.eath and follow her children,” the witness said.
Mackenzie’s former head of security, Enos Amanya Ngala, was initially accused but then entered a plea deal and became a witness for the prosecution.
Mackenzie and other leaders of the cult also face a raft of other legal cases, including for terror!sm, rad!calisation and denying education to children.
But this is the first time the pastor has faced a verdict on the most serious charges of mVrder.
He is due to be sentenced on 6 November.
He was arrested in 2023, after the discovery of more than 400 bodies in shallow graves in Shakahola forest near the Kenyan coast.
Stephen Mwiti, 48, said he lost all six of his children to the cult. His former wife was one of those convicted of murder alongside Mackenzie.
“I’m a happy man, that all persons have been convicted,” he told the BBC outside court.
“All six of my children d!ed in Shakahola forest,” Mwiti said ahead of the verdict, visibly emotional holding a photograph of his family. “I only found and buried the remains of my son Samuel.”
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