A Kenyan court on Friday sentenced a cult leader to 200 years in prison after he was convicted last month of murdering 190 children and an adult who were forced to starve themselves to death to meet Jesus.
The cult leader, Paul Nthenge Mackenzie, had ordered his followers to cease eating, and aides had violently enforced the edict, a court in the Kenyan port city of Mombasa heard during the trial.
While Mr. Mackenzie received the longest sentence, 28 other people were also convicted for their roles in the massacre. Most of the children who died were under 10 years old.
Mr. Mackenzie, a former taxi driver and small-time televangelist, was arrested in 2023 after the Kenyan authorities exhumed the bodies of more than 400 people who died in the preceding two years in the Shakahola Forest, a remote area of southeastern Kenya near the Indian Ocean.
Prosecutors had asked the court to sentence Mr. Mackenzie to death, but the judge, Lady Justice Diana Kavedza-Mochache, declined the request.
“For persons who perceive death as deliverance, a death sentence may be perceived not as punishment, but as a triumph and a form of martyrdom,” she said. The judge noted that Mr. Mackenzie had shown no remorse or empathy for his victims.
Mr. Mackenzie promoted his cult, which operated in Shakahola from about 2019 to 2023, as a sanctuary where followers could find refuge from the apocalypse, which he preached was fast approaching.
Parents who forced their children to fast were among those convicted alongside Mr. Mackenzie, and they received sentences of 10 to 160 years. Mr. Mackenzie had preached that the parents should make sure their children fasted in the sun and died first so that they reached heaven before adult family members, one former member of the cult told The New York Times in an earlier interview.
The Shakahola Massacre, as it is known in Kenya, is one of many instances around the world of charismatic cult leaders who twist religious teachings to gain sway over their followers, sometimes to lethal effect. A notorious example was the 1978 case of Jim Jones, a cult leader who ordered his followers to take their own lives at a remote settlement in Guyana, in South America, leading to at least 900 deaths.
In 2000, in the village of Kanungu in Uganda, followers of a doomsday cult called the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God were found dead, some incinerated. The toll in that massacre was 780 victims.
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