A man who called himself a pastor was sentenced Friday to 200 years in prison for murdering 190 children and one adult through forced starvation, suffocation, and beatings — and he was allowed to operate for years after authorities first knew what he was doing.
Paul Mackenzie's Good News International Church was no church. It was a death cult. And the same government officials who had him on their radar since 2017 chose to look the other way while he relocated his followers to a forest and systematically killed their children. Now more than 400 bodies have been pulled from shallow graves in Kenya's Shakahola Forest, and the media framing is already shifting toward demands for tougher oversight of all religious organizations.
Mackenzie, a former taxi driver who cycled through Catholic, African Brotherhood Church, and Baptist affiliations before launching his own ministry in 2010, preached that the world would end in August 2023. He ordered followers to starve themselves and their children to
