A Kenyan court has sentenced doomsday cult leader Paul Mackenzie to 200 years in prison for murdering 191 people, including 190 children, after ordering his followers to starve to death in the belief that they would meet Jesus. The sentence was delivered on Friday at the High Court in Mombasa.

Mackenzie was convicted in October alongside 28 co defendants over the killings linked to his religious group in Shakahola forest, near Kenya coast. Delivering the sentence, Justice Diana Kavedza Mochache said Mackenzie bore the primary criminal culpability for directing followers to undertake deadly fasts.

The court handed him 100 years for murder by starvation and another 100 years for murder by direct homicide. The sentences in each category will run concurrently, but the two categories will run consecutively, bringing his total prison term to 200 years.

The court said 183 victims died from starvation, including 182 children and one adult, while the remaining eight victims, all children, died through direct acts of violence.

Mackenzie 28 co defendants, including guards who enforced the fasting orders and gravediggers who helped conceal victims bodies, received prison terms of up to 160 years. The court said 15 convicts were sentenced to 160 years, 10 convicts to 140 years, one to 100 years, and two to 10 years each after plea arrangements. The judge also directed that all other convicts, excluding Mackenzie, be assessed for participation in a disengagement, deradicalisation, rehabilitation and reintegration programme.

Mackenzie was arrested in 2023 after authorities discovered hundreds of bodies buried in shallow graves in Shakahola forest in Kilifi County. More than 400 bodies have since been exhumed from the forest, making it one of Kenya deadliest cult related disasters, though the 191 murder convictions relate only to the victims in the case decided last month.

Mackenzie founded Good News International Ministries in 2003 and became known for sermons in which he described education and healthcare as evil. The court found that the fasting was not voluntary but was enforced through an organised system of religious indoctrination, intimidation, confinement and the withholding of food and water. Children were targeted first before the practice spread to young people, women and men.

The prosecution had argued for the death penalty for Mackenzie and life imprisonment for his accomplices, citing the gravity of the crimes and what it described as his lack of remorse. The court declined to impose capital punishment, citing the possibility of rehabilitation. Kenya has not carried out an execution since 1987. Mackenzie also faces separate manslaughter, terrorism, child abuse and torture charges, which he denies, and the convicted defendants have been granted 14 days to appeal.