Doomsday preacher’s murder judgment today

A Kenyan court is set to deliver a judgment today (Monday) in a mass murder case involving doomsday preacher Paul Mackenzie, reports BBC News. Mackenzie and 29 of his followers are being charged with the murder of 191 people, nearly all of them children. His cult is alleged to have forced children to starve to death so that they could ‘meet Jesus’. His doomsday doctrine said that education was forbidden and modern medicine was considered ‘evil’. Mackenzie and the 29 others have all pleaded not guilty to murder, repeatedly insisting that nobody was forced to die. Mackenzie's former head of security, Enos Amanya Ngala, was initially accused but then entered a plea deal and became a witness for the prosecution. Mackenzie and other leaders of the cult are facing a raft of other legal cases, including for terrorism, radicalisation and denying education to children. But this is the first time the pastor will face a verdict on the most serious charges of murder. Authorities said over 400 bodies were found in shallow graves in Shakahola forest near the Kenyan coast, where Mackenzie led his followers from across the country. Seventeen men were hired from the nearby town for the horrifying task of digging up the shallow graves. Grave diggers described some of the bodies of children as having had their ‘hands and legs tied and bodies wrapped in bedsheets’. Although many of Mackenzie's followers were from elsewhere in Kenya, some of the remains are of people who were familiar to the community because the people in the cult would often go to nearby Shakahola town for supplies and to fetch water from the River Galana which flows through the town. Mwiti's former wife is one of those accused alongside Mackenzie.