A Kenyan court has sentenced doomsday cult leader Paul Nthenge Mackenzie to 200 years in prison for the murder of 191 people, all but one of them children, in the Shakahola forest starvation case. The sentence was handed down by the High Court in Mombasa on Friday, November 6, presided over by Lady Justice Diana Kavedza, according to court reporting by Pulse Kenya, Khusoko and Vipasho. BBC News, which also reported the sentencing on Friday, summarised the outcome as a life sentence; the Kenyan outlets give the detailed structure behind that summary.

Source: Pulse Kenya

The court structured the term as 100 years' imprisonment for the murders by starvation — 183 counts, covering 182 children and one adult, to run concurrently among themselves — and a further 100 years for eight murders by direct homicide, the two blocks to run consecutively, for a total of 200 years. Reports said 183 victims died from complete starvation while eight children died from direct homicide including strangulation and blunt-force trauma. Mackenzie, 50, will in practice die in prison.

From conviction in October to sentence in November

The sentencing is the follow-up to the verdict Awaaz Punjab reported on October 19, when Mackenzie and 28 others were found guilty of the 191 murders after a trial in which all had pleaded not guilty and insisted nobody was forced to die — a claim the court rejected. One co-accused, Enos Amanya Ngala, had earlier pleaded guilty to all 191 counts. Assistant pastor Smart Mwakalama was reported sentenced to 160 years. The prosecution, through the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions, had urged the court to sentence Mackenzie to death and sought life imprisonment for co-accused, citing the gravity of their roles; the court declined the death penalty, noting Kenya has not carried out an execution since 1987, while describing the crimes as meeting the threshold of the rarest of rare cases.

Source: Khusoko

This sentencing follows the October 19 conviction in the same case — read the verdict report here: Mackenzie and 28 others found guilty of 191 murders

What happened in Shakahola

Mackenzie founded the Good News International Ministries in 2003 and, prosecutors said, instructed followers to move to Shakahola Forest in Kilifi County, near the coastal town of Malindi, and to starve themselves and their children to death so they could 'meet Jesus' before the end of the world. The deaths in this case occurred between January 2021 and September 2023. Police began recovering bodies from shallow graves in the forest in April 2023, in what became one of the largest criminal investigations in Kenya's recent history. The trial covered 191 victims, while the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights counts 448 bodies exhumed from the forest in total.

Source: Vipasho / BBC News

Justice Kavedza's earlier eight-hour judgment, as reported by BBC News, said Mackenzie's followers believed he was Jesus's mouthpiece and that his word carried absolute authority inside the group. The judge described how the group operated as an organised system of religious coercion, with followers instructed to starve their children as part of an apocalyptic doctrine.

What happens next

The main murder trial is now closed, but Mackenzie and others still face separate proceedings, including a case over 52 more deaths found in a village about 30 kilometres from Shakahola — which would bring the suspected total to around 500 — as well as charges reported to include terrorism, radicalisation, manslaughter and child-related offences. No date for the separate 52-deaths case was given in the reports available. For the families of the 191 victims in this case, Friday's sentence ends the court process that began with the graves found in April 2023, more than three years ago.