By Vincent Mumo Nzilani and Humphrey Malalo
NAIROBI, Feb 11 (Reuters) – Kenyan cult leader Paul Mackenzie and seven others linked to a doomsday sect were issued with new charges on Wednesday over the deaths of 52 people whose bodies were found in shallow graves in southeast Kenya in 2025, a court charge sheet showed.
Mackenzie and others were already facing charges including murder and terrorism in connection with the deaths of people whose bodies were exhumed earlier from Shakahola forest, in one of the world’s biggest cult-related disasters in recent history.
Prosecutors say Mackenzie and his Good News International Church organised a cult in which they ordered followers to starve themselves and their children to death to go to heaven before the world ended. Mackenzie has denied the accusations.
By 2025, two years after investigations began, prosecutors said more than 400 bodies had been recovered from Shakahola Forest, which is located in Kilifi County on Kenya’s east coast.
Investigators widened their focus to other suspected grave sites and by August 2025, 52 bodies had been recovered from shallow graves in and around Kwa Binzaro, which lies around 30 km (18 miles) from Shakahola.
Mackenzie and the other defendants appeared before a magistrate in the city of Mombasa on Wednesday for a joint plea-taking in the latest case.
Prosecutors say Mackenzie masterminded and oversaw the offences at Kwa Binzaro, continuing to direct them after his detention in 2023 and using methods that included radical teachings to draw victims to the remote site.
In late January, Kenya’s Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions (ODPP) said in a statement posted on social media platform X: “Court heard that investigators recovered handwritten notes from (prison) cells occupied by Mackenzie, allegedly detailing (financial) transactions conducted through mobile phones.”
The charge sheet said the defendants faced counts including murder, participation in organised criminal activity under Kenya’s organised-crime law, and offences linked to radicalisation and the facilitation of terrorist acts under the country’s counter-terrorism framework.
The defendants all pleaded not guilty.
(Reporting by Humphrey Malalo; Writing by Vincent Mumo Nzilani; Editing by George Obulutsa and Aidan Lewis)
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