The leader of a Kenyan doomsday cult linked to the deaths of more than 400 people has been given a 200-year sentence.

Paul Mackenzie, who led an apocalyptic Christian church in a forest near the Indian Ocean coast, told his followers to starve themselves to death, along with their children, to reach heaven before the end of the world.

He was convicted of the murders of 190 children and one adult alongside 28 of his followers.

They including guards who enforced his fasting directives and gravediggers who helped conceal the mass graves.

The case stems from the April 2023 discovery of mass graves eventually found to contain 448 bodies in Shakahola Forest, where cult members lived off grid in mud huts.

Mackenzie is also accused of ordering the deaths of 52 people found at a separate location in a village 20 miles away, bringing the suspected death toll to 500.

He has pleaded not guilty in that case.

During the sentencing, Justice Diana Kavedza said that 183 victims died of starvation, defined as a complete lack of food, and the other eight were classified as murder by direct homicide.

She said the killings were ‘cold and calculated’ and dismissed claims by some of the accused that the loss of their own children altered the fact that they had participated in the killings of many other children.

The justice said that the perpetrators didn’t show remorse and declared they were ready to fast to death as well.

The scale of the killing is comparable to that of a doomsday cult that killed more than 700 people in Uganda in 2000, and the 1978 Jonestown massacre in Guyana when an American cult leader killed more than 900 people by ordering them to drink poison.

The prosecution had argued for the death penalty for Mackenzie and life imprisonment for his accomplices.

Mackenzie is also facing terrorism, child abuse and torture charges in two other courts.

Stephen Mwiti, 48, father of six of Mackenzie’s child victims and husband of one of his convicted accomplices, said his wife had taken the children to Shakahola where they were starved to death.

‘I lost children and I will not be able to get them back no matter what happens to Mackenzie and his accomplices,’ he said.

‘I expect him to be sentenced to death or be jailed for life so that he never comes out to cause more deaths.’

Dan Mackenzie, one of Paul’s sons, said his father did not spare his own family.

‘I didn’t end up in Shakahola, because I didn’t believe any more about going to heaven. So I left the church and started doing my own thing,’ he told Reuters.

‘I lost friends too, and my younger brother. It’s justice to the people who we lost over there in Shakahola.’

Mackenzie had been on the radar of the authorities since 2017 when his premises were searched by police.

In 2019, authorities shut down Mackenzie’s church in Malindi and he relocated to the nearby Shakahola Forest.

The discoveries prompted calls for tighter oversight of religious groups.

President William Ruto appointed a task force in May 2023 to review the legal and regulatory framework, and separate government-backed and Senate proposals were published in 2024, though they have yet to be passed into law.

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