A preacher who told his followers that starving their children was the road to heaven has finally heard what a judge thinks of that promise.
A Kenyan court found self-proclaimed pastor Paul Mackenzie Nthenge guilty on Monday, Oct. 19, 2026, of murdering 190 children and one adult.
Mackenzie, who is in his early 50s, was convicted at the Mombasa Law Courts along with about 30 co-accused after Justice Diana Kavedza spent eight hours delivering her judgment. Every defendant had pleaded not guilty, insisting throughout the trial that nobody was forced to die. Prosecutors said the 191 deaths happened between January 2021 and September 2023 in Shakahola forest, Kilifi County, and described the case as one of Kenya’s most consequential criminal trials.
Kavedza rejected the argument that children who kept fasting until they died had made a decision of their own. Children between the ages of six and 10, she found, lacked the abstract reasoning to grasp that death is permanent. “The children did not therefore give free informed and legally meaningful consent to fast to death,” she ruled.
The starvation deaths resulted from the unlawful acts and omissions of those who enforced the fasting regime, the judge found, rather than from unintended consequences of religious practice. Each defendant played a different role, she said, but their conduct formed part of the same criminal enterprise. Before turning to the murder counts, the court observed that the evidence raised the question of whether the conduct could bear the character of crimes against humanity.
Children First, Then Unmarried Women
Fasting moved through the settlement in stages, prosecutors said, starting with the children, while guards controlled movement and stopped followers from escaping. Parents were directed to withhold food from their children. A dry fast followed, barring followers from drinking water.
Survivors said the order ran from children to unmarried women, then men, then the church’s leaders. Mackenzie is not believed to have starved himself.
His followers believed he spoke for Jesus, the judge said. Burials inside the forest were called weddings, and those who died were celebrated as having wed Jesus.
The Graves Hidden in the Forest
Authorities began exhuming the shallow graves in April 2023 and have recovered 429 bodies. Many victims starved; others showed signs consistent with asphyxia, neck compression, strangulation and blunt injuries, and some were found with their hands and legs bound. Hundreds of people linked to the cult are still declared missing.
Seventeen men were hired from a nearby town to dig up the graves, some paid just $8 a day. The prosecution called 121 witnesses during the trial, among them survivors, investigators, relatives and forensic experts. One was Enos Amanya Ngala, Mackenzie’s former head of security, who was initially accused himself before entering a plea deal and testifying for the state.
From a Nairobi Taxi to Times TV
Mackenzie drove a taxi in Nairobi before he and his wife founded Good News International Ministries in 2003 in the coastal town of Malindi. The church spread across branches in Kenya and drew thousands of followers, some of whom sold property to donate. His sermons went out on the church’s own station, Times TV.
He preached that education was evil and forbade children from attending school. He banned followers from taking medication and told them to burn their birth certificates and digital IDs. His preaching was anti-Western, condemning the United States, the United Nations and the Catholic Church.
After his church and television station were shut down in 2019, Mackenzie moved to 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.
A mitigation hearing is scheduled for Oct. 30, with sentencing on Nov. 6. Defense lawyer Lawrence Obonyo said the defense will appeal, and that his client maintains he forced no one to fast. Mackenzie and other cult leaders still face separate cases, including terrorism, radicalization and denying children an education.
Stephen Mwiti, 48, lost all six of his children in Shakahola forest, and has found and buried the remains of only one of them, his son Samuel. 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.