Kenyan Cult Leader Faces Charges Over 52 Additional Deaths

A Kenyan court has charged Paul Mackenzie, a self-proclaimed preacher, and seven others linked to a cult in connection with the additional deaths of 52 people.

In a statement on X on Wednesday, the public prosecutor announced that the preacher and the other defendants had been charged with “organized criminal activity, two counts of radicalization, and two counts of facilitating the commission of a terrorist act” in relation to the “deaths of at least 52 people in the Kwa Binzaro area of Chakama, Kilifi County.”

The prosecutor’s office said the accused allegedly promoted an extreme belief system by preaching against government authority, adopting extremist views, and facilitating the commission of a terrorist act.

Mackenzie and his Good News International Church allegedly led a cult in which followers were ordered to starve themselves and their children to death in order to “go to heaven” before the world ended, prosecutors stated.

Mackenzie and others were already facing charges, including murder and terrorism, in connection with the deaths of people whose bodies were found in shallow graves in southeastern Kenya last year. The case is considered one of the world’s largest cult-related disasters in recent history, as hundreds of bodies were exhumed from Shakahola Forest.

By 2025, two years after investigations began, prosecutors said more than 400 bodies had been recovered from Shakahola Forest, located in Kilifi County on Kenya’s east coast.

The defendants pleaded not guilty. The next hearing in the case is scheduled for March 4.