Victim’s family welcomes Kenyan cult leader’s murder conviction

Francis Wanje, 62, who lost eight family members, including two grandchildren, to ​the mass starvation cult led by Paul Mackenzie in Kenya, says the judgment made him happy and gave him confidence in the judiciary.

Mackenzie and 28 others were found guilty of murder by a Kenyan court on Monday o ver the deaths of 190 children and ‌an adult in one of the world’s worst cult-related tragedies in recent history.

“So many are going to learn from what has come up today. … You find churches everywhere, but they’ve got ill reasons for the churches.

So it is good for members of the public to be very careful,” Wanje added.

The preacher was arrested in 2023 after police received a tip-off, and weeks later authorities began uncovering bodies in shallow graves in the Shakahola Forest near the coast in southeastern Kenya.

Prosecutors say Mackenzie and his Good News International Church organised a Christian doomsday sect in which they ordered followers to starve themselves and their children to death to go to heaven before the world ​ended.

The case has gripped Kenya since the discovery of the mass graves.

It raised questions over how Mackenzie was able to continue to operate despite having been on the radar ​of the authorities since 2017, when his premises were searched by police.

In 2019, authorities shut down Mackenzie’s church, and he relocated to the Shakahola ⁠Forest, police said.

GRANDFATHER HAILS JUDGMENT Mackenzie denied murder charges, saying he did not force the victims to starve, but the court rejected that argument.

He and the others convicted will be sentenced on ​November 6.

Defence lawyer Lawrence Obonyo, who represents Mackenzie and almost all of the others convicted, said he had been instructed to appeal.

In total, more than 400 bodies have been recovered from the Shakahola Forest.

Many of the ​children’s bodies were severely decomposed, with only 26 able to be identified, and investigations into the other deaths are ongoing.