A judge needed eight hours to explain why 191 deaths in a Kenyan forest were murders rather than acts of faith.
A Kenyan court on Monday, Oct. 19, 2026, convicted self-proclaimed pastor Paul Mackenzie Nthenge of murdering 190 children and one adult, and found 28 others guilty alongside him at the Mombasa Law Courts.
Mackenzie, who is in his early 50s, wore a striped polo shirt and red trousers in the dock and sat beside his wife, one of the co-accused. He stood silently and stared into space when Justice Diana Kavedza read out his name.
Every defendant pleaded not guilty, each insisting throughout the trial that nobody was forced to die. Prosecutors placed the 191 deaths between January 2021 and September 2023 in the Shakahola forest in Kilifi County, and described the case as one of Kenya’s most consequential criminal trials.
Why Six-Year-Olds Could Not Consent
Kavedza rejected the argument that children who fasted to death had made their own decision. Children between the ages of six and 10 had not yet developed the abstract reasoning needed to grasp that death is permanent, she found. “The children did not therefore give free informed and legally meaningful consent to fast to death,” she ruled.
Those who enforced the fasting regime caused the starvation deaths through their unlawful acts and omissions, the judge found, and the deaths were not unintended consequences of religious practice. The defendants each took on a distinct role, she said, yet their conduct belonged to a single criminal enterprise. In some cases, she said in a hearing that lasted more than eight hours, children were isolated and denied food while their parents watched.
The court, before reaching the murder counts, noted that the evidence posed a question: could the conduct bear the character of crimes against humanity? His followers believed Mackenzie spoke for Jesus, the judge said. Burials inside the forest went by the name of weddings, and the dead were celebrated as having wed Jesus.
Guards Blocked the Escape Routes
The children fasted first as the practice moved through the settlement in stages, prosecutors said, and guards controlled movement so that followers could not escape. Parents received instructions to withhold food from their children. Then came a dry fast, which barred followers from drinking water. The sequence ran from children to unmarried women, then men, then the church’s leaders, survivors said. Mackenzie is not believed to have starved himself.
Most of the Dead Remain Nameless
Authorities began exhuming the shallow graves in April 2023 and have recovered 429 bodies. As of Oct. 20, investigators had identified only 26 of the more than 400 bodies, many of them severely decomposed, and investigations into deaths not covered by the 191 counts were continuing.
Starvation killed many of the victims. Signs consistent with asphyxia, neck compression, strangulation and blunt injuries appeared on others, and some were found with 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 paid just $8 a day.
The prosecution called 121 witnesses, among them survivors, investigators, relatives and forensic experts. Enos Amanya Ngala, Mackenzie’s former head of security, was initially accused himself, then entered a plea deal and testified for the state.
He Buried Only One Son
Stephen Mwiti, 48, lost all six of his children in the Shakahola forest. He has recovered and buried the remains of only one of them, his son Samuel, and his former wife was among those convicted alongside Mackenzie. “I’m a happy man, that all persons have been convicted,” he 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.
The court will hear mitigation on Oct. 30 and pass sentence on Nov. 6. Defense lawyer Lawrence Obonyo said the defense will appeal, and that his client maintains he forced no one to fast.
Separate cases are still pending against Mackenzie and other cult leaders, including terrorism, radicalization and denying children an education. Prosecutors say that while he was in detention he also directed the deaths of 52 people in Kwa Binzaro village, about 30 kilometers from Shakahola. He has pleaded not guilty in that case.
Before he founded the church, Mackenzie drove a taxi in Nairobi. He and his wife started Good News International Ministries in 2003 in the coastal town of Malindi, and it spread through branches across Kenya to thousands of followers, some of whom sold property to donate. His sermons aired on the church’s own station, Times TV, where he called education evil and forbade children from attending school. He also banned followers from taking medication and told them to burn their birth certificates and digital IDs. His preaching ran anti-Western, condemning the United States, the United Nations and the Catholic Church.
Authorities shut down his church and television station in 2019, after which Mackenzie moved to the Shakahola forest, about 70 kilometers (about 43 miles) from Malindi, and some of his devotees followed him there to live in mud houses. In 2023, a man whose wife and daughter had relocated to the forest tipped off the authorities, leading police to the mass graves and to emaciated survivors who said they had been ordered to starve until they met Jesus. He was charged in January 2024 with 191 counts of murder, and his church was proscribed as an organized criminal group.