A self-proclaimed pastor who preached that starving children was the road to heaven now carries 191 murder convictions.
A Kenyan court convicted Paul Mackenzie Nthenge on Monday, Oct. 19, 2026, of the murder of 190 children and one adult, and convicted 28 co-accused alongside him at the Mombasa Law Courts.
Prosecutors said 191 people died between January 2021 and September 2023 in the Shakahola forest in Kilifi County, in what they described as one of Kenya’s most consequential criminal trials.
Mackenzie, who is in his early 50s, wore a striped polo shirt and red trousers in court, where he stood alongside his wife, one of the co-accused. He stood silently and stared into space as the judge read his name.
Every defendant pleaded not guilty, and they insisted throughout the trial that nobody was forced to die. Justice Diana Kavedza Mochache took eight hours to deliver the judgment.
The court scheduled a mitigation hearing for Oct. 30 and sentencing for Nov. 6. Defense lawyer Lawrence Obonyo said the defense will appeal, and that his client maintains he forced no one to fast.
Mackenzie and other cult leaders still face separate pending cases involving terrorism, radicalization and denying children an education. Prosecutors say he directed the deaths of 52 people at Kwa Binzaro village, about 30 kilometers from Shakahola, while he was in detention; he pleaded not guilty.
The Children Could Not Consent
Kavedza rejected the argument that the children who fasted to death had made their own decision. The children were aged six to 10, she found, had no capacity for abstract reasoning and did not grasp the permanence of death.
“The children did not therefore give free informed and legally meaningful consent to fast to death,” she ruled.
The starvation deaths came from the unlawful acts and omissions of those enforcing the fasting regime, the judge said, not from unintended consequences of religious practice. Some children were isolated and denied food while their parents watched, she said.
Each defendant played a different role, the judge said, but their conduct formed part of the same criminal enterprise. The court also observed, before it turned to the murder counts, that the evidence raised the question of whether the conduct could bear the character of crimes against humanity.
Followers believed Mackenzie spoke for Jesus, the judge said. Burials in the forest were termed weddings, and the dead were celebrated as having wed Jesus.
Six Children Lost, One Buried
Stephen Mwiti, 48, lost all six of his children in the Shakahola forest. The remains of only one, his son Samuel, were found and buried, and his former wife is among those convicted alongside Mackenzie.
“I’m a happy man, that all persons have been convicted,” Mwiti told the BBC outside court.
Francis Wanje, 62, lost eight family members, including two grandchildren. “It has been really a heavy thing (for) us as a family, and it has really taken us very far in terms of psychological problems,” he said before the verdict.
Children First, Then the Leaders
The fasting moved in stages through the settlement, and the children went first, prosecutors said. Guards controlled movement and blocked escapes.
Parents were directed to withhold food from their children, and a dry fast followed, with drinking water barred. Survivors said the order ran from the children to unmarried women, then the men, then the church’s leaders. Mackenzie is not believed to have starved himself.
He drove a taxi in Nairobi before the church. He and his wife founded Good News International Ministries in 2003 in the coastal town of Malindi, and it spread across branches in Kenya and drew thousands of followers, some of whom sold property to donate.
Mackenzie aired sermons on the church’s own station, Times TV, preaching that education was evil and forbidding children from school. He banned medication, ordered followers to burn birth certificates and digital IDs, and condemned the United States, the United Nations and the Catholic Church.
The church and the television station were shut down in 2019. Mackenzie moved to the Shakahola forest, about 70 kilometers (about 43 miles) from Malindi, and devotees followed him there and lived in mud houses.
A tip-off in 2023 from a man whose wife and daughter had relocated to the forest led police to mass graves and emaciated survivors, who said they had been ordered to starve until they met Jesus. Prosecutors charged Mackenzie in January 2024 with 191 counts of murder, and his church was proscribed as an organized criminal group.
Only 26 Bodies Have Names
Authorities began exhuming shallow graves in April 2023 and recovered 429 bodies. Only 26 of the more than 400 bodies had been identified as of Oct. 20, many of them severely decomposed, and investigations into deaths not covered by the 191 counts are continuing.
Many of the dead starved. Others showed signs consistent with asphyxia, neck compression, strangulation and blunt injuries, and some bodies had their hands and legs bound. Hundreds of people linked to the cult are still declared missing.
Seventeen men hired from a nearby town did the digging, some of them paid just $8 a day. Prosecutors called 121 witnesses, among them survivors, investigators, relatives and forensic experts, and they initially accused Enos Amanya Ngala, Mackenzie’s former head of security, who then entered a plea deal and testified for the state.
