A Kenyan court has sentenced doomsday sect leader Paul Mackenzie to 200 years in prison for the murders of 190 children and one adult who were starved to death on his orders, according to the Guardian. The sentence came two weeks after a court in Mombasa found Mackenzie guilty of the crimes.
The sentence is made up of 100 years for murder by starvation and 100 years for direct homicide, the Guardian reported.
Prosecutors said followers of Mackenzie’s Good News International church were ordered to starve themselves and their children so they could go to heaven before the world ended, according to the Guardian.
Justice Diana Kavedza-Mochache said in a hearing lasting more than eight hours that in some cases children were isolated and denied food while their parents watched, the Guardian reported.
According to Africanews, the sentence has drawn mixed reactions, with some people calling the term fair and others saying it did not go far enough. Only a headline and a short excerpt from that report were available, so the details of those reactions could not be confirmed.
The sources do not include a response to the sentence from Mackenzie or his lawyers, or from the government or prosecutors. They also do not say which court issued the sentence or give a sentencing date. The Mombasa court is named only as the court that found him guilty.
Mackenzie was arrested in 2023 after a police tip-off. Authorities then began uncovering bodies in shallow graves in the Shakahola forest near the coast in south-eastern Kenya. According to the Guardian, more than 400 bodies have been recovered from the forest, but only 26 could be identified.
Mackenzie denied the murder charges and said he did not force victims to starve. According to the Guardian, the court rejected that argument.
Mackenzie faces other charges over the forest deaths, including terrorism, which he has denied. He has also pleaded not guilty to charges over 52 deaths in Kwa Binzaro village, which prosecutors say he directed while in detention. Investigations into more than 200 other deaths are continuing, and the Guardian gives no figures beyond that.
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This article was written with AI assistance from the published reporting listed above. It is part of the World Brief daily news podcast.