MOMBASA — Children were the first made to fast at Shakahola, and guards prevented followers from escaping, a Kenyan judge found on Monday, according to prosecutors, as she convicted the preacher Paul Nthenge Mackenzie and 28 co-accused of 191 murders.
Lady Justice Diana Kavedza delivered the judgment at the Mombasa High Court. The deaths, between January 2021 and September 2023 in Kilifi County, came from an organised system in which religious teaching and an established hierarchy directed and enforced deadly fasting, the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions said in a statement posted to X. Pathologists in Malindi began autopsies of the victims in 2023, and the statement says bodies were exhumed from graves across several homesteads, among them a mass grave of 12 and another site where several graves held 63.
The court also found that Mackenzie’s Good News International Church operated as a cult, the statement says. The order to fast travelled through village elders, was reinforced at regular meetings and was enforced through a structured system, and the court considered evidence that the settlement was divided into 12 villages. The convicted include Mackenzie, his deputy pastor Smart Deri Mwakalama and 27 others.
The medical evidence is less tidy than the verdict. Prosecution witness Dr Njoroge produced 190 postmortem samples from dead minors, and the statement attributes 76 deaths to starvation, 112 to unascertained causes, one to a traumatic head injury, one to manual neck compression and one to asphyxia with features of starvation. Those figures sum to 191, one more than the samples, and the statement does not say why. Al Jazeera reported 429 deaths in all, with hundreds of people still missing, so the 191 counts cover fewer than half.
Mackenzie and the other defendants had pleaded not guilty and denied charges in other cases, including terrorism, radicalisation and stopping children from attaining an education, according to Al Jazeera. TEH has seen no response from their lawyers.
Another defendant, Enos Amanya, pleaded guilty in January to murdering 191 followers and was convicted by the same judge on his own plea, Anadolu reported. A prosecutor told that court he had been a grave digger and a security enforcer for the sect. By May 2023 TEH was reporting a toll of 179 in what it called a fasting to enter paradise ritual.
The statement gives no sentencing date, and TEH could not obtain the written judgment. What the judge made of the 112 deaths with no ascertained cause is not in the account prosecutors have released.
