Kenyan Cult Leader Charged with Terrorism After Hundreds of Followers Starved Themselves to Death

Paul Nthenge Mackenzie, leader of the Good News International Church, and 94 of his associates were charged in Kenyan court on Thursday with terrorism-related crimes over the starvation deaths of 429 of his followers.

Mackenzie was accused of ordering his followers to starve themselves so they could enter Heaven before the destruction of the world. Mackenzie was arrested in April 2023 after the police were tipped off to the starvation cult by a human rights group called Haki Africa.

Many members of the Good News International Church were so determined to carry out Mackenzie’s order of suicide by starvation that they went into hiding in the Shakahola Forest of eastern Kenya, hiding from the police and military search teams. Some of the cultists taken into custody had to be physically forced to eat.

Mackenzie was arrested twice before the starvation horror was discovered, including for an incident in March 2023 in which two children’s parents murdered them through suffocation and starvation on Mackenzie’s orders. 

Mackenzie told the authorities he was no longer the leader of a church and merely owned some farmland in Shakahola, but his half-starved followers kept turning up, along with dozens of corpses packed into shallow graves.

Kenyan officials said more than 400 bodies were ultimately recovered from the forest, most of them dead from malnutrition, although some of the cultists violently murdered children who refused to follow the starvation plan. Mackenzie allegedly maintained a squad of 16 enforcers to ensure that none of his followers had second thoughts and backed out of the suicide pact.

Officials hinted all along that Mackenzie might be tried on terrorism charges, and on Friday, such charges were filed in Mombasa.

Court documents described Mackenzie’s church as an “organized criminal group engaged in organized criminal activities, thereby endangering lives and leading to the deaths of 429 members and followers.” This was evidently the legal basis for charging Mackenzie with terrorist activity.

Prosecutors also charged Mackenzie and his associates with “organized criminal activity” and “radicalization.” All of the defendants pleaded not guilty to the charges and will return to the court on February 8 for a bond hearing.

According to Al Jazeera, the prosecution has been struggling to put its case together against Mackenzie, requesting several extensions of his pre-trial detention to gain more time. The court finally warned that it would release him if charges were not filed within 14 days.

Another Kenyan judge in the coastal town of Malindi on Wednesday ordered Mackenzie and 30 of his associates to undergo mental health evaluations so they could face charges of “murder, manslaughter, terrorism, and torture.”

Prosecutors in Malindi told reporters the charges will be filed within two weeks and will include 191 counts of child murder. According to a former cult member, Mackenzie preached that children should be murdered first, starving in bright sunlight “so they would die faster,” so their parents could be certain the children made it to Heaven before they killed themselves.

“When adults died, it meant their children had already starved to death,” said Hussein Khalid, executive director of Haki Africa, the group that alerted the authorities to Mackenzie’s cult.