Shakahola cult leader Paul Mackenzie guilty of 191 murder charges in Kenya

The leader of a Kenyan doomsday cult, Paul Mackenzie, has been found guilty of murdering 191 people, all but one of them children.

Mackenzie ordered members of his cult to starve their children to death so they could “meet Jesus”.

His doctrine said that education was forbidden and modern medicine was “evil”.

Twenty-nine other leaders of his cult were also convicted of murder. They had all pleaded not guilty, repeatedly insisting that nobody was forced to die.

Warning: This article contains some details which some people might find distressing.

Delivering her eight-hour judgement, Justice Diana Mochache said Mackenzie’s followers believed he was “Jesus’s mouthpiece”.

One of his co-accused said Mackenzie had told his followers that anyone who “resisted the directive to fast must be forced to go to heaven through kicks and blows”.

Burials inside the forest where the cult was based were called “weddings”. Those who died “were celebrated as having wedded with Jesus”, the judge said.

One witness stated that a pregnant woman had been barred from nursing her new-born baby, who died 12 days later. “She was instructed to fast to death and follow her children,” the witness said.

Mackenzie’s former head of security, Enos Amanya Ngala, was initially accused but then entered a plea deal and became a witness for the prosecution.

Mackenzie and other leaders of the cult also face a raft of other legal cases, including for terrorism, radicalisation and denying education to children.

But this is the first time the pastor has faced a verdict on the most serious charges of murder.

Authorities said over 400 bodies were found in shallow graves in Shakahola forest near the Kenyan coast, where Mackenzie led his followers from across the country.

Seventeen men were hired from the nearby town for the horrifying task of digging up the shallow graves. Some were paid just $8 (£6) a day.

“Every grave we found had at least three bodies,” James, one of the gravediggers, told the BBC. “Some of the remains were of children as young as a few weeks old.”

“We once found 12 bodies of children in a line inside a grave. It was massive, the bodies were arranged like clothes. One on top of another.”

Gravediggers described some of the bodies of children as having had their “hands and legs tied and bodies wrapped in bedsheets”.