In Kenya, located in East Africa, a trial is underway against the leader of a religious cult who starved hundreds of people.
A pastor who led a Kenyan religious cult Paul Mackenzie accused of 191 murders. Most of the victims had died of starvation. Based on the autopsies, some of the victims had been beaten, strangled or suffocated.
Already earlier, the cult leader and 94 members of his staff were charged with murder, torture, cruelty and terrorism.
Signs of severe and long-term malnutrition have been found in the victims. Among the victims are many children. Among other things The British Broadcasting Corporation BBC writes about the family man, whose wife and six children joined the sect and lost their lives.
Kenyans have been particularly agitated by the news that the pastor had previously been accused of two child deaths in 2019.
The apparently strangled and strangled child victims were found in a shallow grave in the Shakahola forest. Mackenzie was released on bail at the time. The pastor himself has seven children.
Hundreds of bodies in mass graves
Pastor Mackenzie was arrested last April after hundreds of mass graves were found near the residential area of the sect he leads in Shakahola, near Malindi.
The cult leader has been given a mental state examination before the start of the trial. Mackenzie denies the charges, as he says he stopped the activities of his church in 2019.
According to the witnesses, refusing food and fasting smoothed the preacher’s doctrine “the way to Jesus”. The harsher the denial, the surer the place in heaven before the inevitable apocalypse.
Mass murder tightens the control of religious communities
The government plans to tighten the control of alternative communities due to the gruesome discoveries in the remote forest area of Shakahola. The majority religion in Kenya, with a population of 53 million, is Christianity. There are more than 4,000 registered churches. Some of the communities engage in criminal activities.
Pastor Mackenzie’s Church of the Good News is compared to organized crime in the indictment.
In connection with the trial, it has been wondered how a self-taught preacher could build a cult, even though he had previously been convicted of bigotry and teaching against the Bible in schools. The pastor himself says that he offered the schoolchildren an alternative interpretation of faith.
Controlling the activities of churches has previously been opposed for constitutional reasons. In Kenya, they have wanted to keep church and state strictly separate from each other.