Deliberately starve to meet Jesus: That message claimed the lives of at least 51 members of the Good News International Church in Kenya. In the latest excavations in a forest near Malindi, in the east of the country, Kenyan police found 26 bodies on Sunday, the French news agency AFP reported. They were followers of the notorious cult leader Paul Mackenzie, who previously caused a stir by convincing his followers that education was “satanic.”
Kenyan police discovered the graves after a tip from a pan-African human rights organization. Some survivors still refuse food despite their emaciated bodies. “Since she came here, she refuses all help and her mouth remains hermetically closed. She wants to keep fasting until she dies,” an aid worker told AFP on Sunday about a woman who was found alive by Kenyan emergency services.
According to Charles Kamau, who leads the criminal investigation, the search for bodies has been in full swing since Friday. The search teams are also still focusing on survivors in the forest of more than three hundred hectares. According to the Kenyan Red Cross, 112 people have been reported missing so far.
Persuasiveness
That Mackenzie has extraordinary powers of persuasion is evidenced by the bizarre things he managed to move his followers to do in recent years, and for which he ended up behind bars for short periods of time several times.
In 2018, a commotion arose in Kenya over a video that circulated on the internet in which a number of his young followers expressed their abhorrence of education. One of the boys says in it that education is for the “wicked”—that is said to be in the Bible. A year earlier, a police raid on a Mackenzie’s Good News International Church building found 93 children, reports the Kenyan news medium Citizen Digitalwho had traded their home and school for the lessons of their pastor.
Starving children
Mackenzie was also arrested once this year, then because he allegedly told parents to starve their children and let them suffocate. The cult leader himself denies all allegations: he claims to be the target of hostile propaganda from former colleagues. He is always released on bail, so that he can continue his work. Now Mackenzie has been detained for a month now, this time on suspicion of cultism. Politicians are trying to prevent him from being released again.
On Tuesday, a visit by the Kenyan Minister of the Interior, Kithure Kindiki, to the graves in the forest is on the agenda. He speaks on Twitter of ‘obvious abuse of the fundamental right of religious freedom’ and calls for stricter regulation of religious communities.