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-eight other leaders of his cult were also convicted of murder. They had all pleaded not guilty, repeatedly insisting that nobody was forced to die.
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Delivering her eight-hour judgement in the port city of Mombasa, 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. He is due to be sentenced on 6 November.
He was arrested in 2023, after the discovery of more than 400 bodies in shallow graves in Shakahola forest near the Kenyan coast, where Mackenzie had led his followers from across the country.
Stephen Mwiti, 48, said he lost all six of his children to the cult. His former wife was one of those convicted of murder alongside Mackenzie.
“I’m a happy man, that all persons have been convicted,” he told the BBC from his home in the coastal town of Malindi, 70km (43 miles) from Shakahola.
“All six of my children died in Shakahola forest,” Mwiti said ahead of the verdict, visibly emotional holding a photograph of his family. “I only found and buried the remains of my son Samuel.”
