After an eight-hour judgement read in the port city of Mombasa, Justice Diana Mochache found self-proclaimed pastor Paul Mackenzie guilty of murdering 191 people — 190 children and one adult — along with 28 associates of his Good News International Church, per CBS News and Al Jazeera.

Prosecutors said the deaths resulted from an organised system that used religious teachings and an established hierarchy to enforce what judges called deadly fasting, begun around January 2021 and lasting more than two years, AP reports.

Mackenzie's followers believed he was "Jesus's mouthpiece," the judge said, and his doctrine declared education forbidden and modern medicine evil, the BBC reports. One co-accused testified that anyone who resisted the directive to fast had to be forced to heaven through kicks and blows.

Burials in Shakahola forest were called "weddings," with the dead celebrated as having wedded Jesus, and prosecutors described a structured hierarchy of death in which children died first, then teenagers, women and then men.

Mackenzie closed his Malindi church in 2019 and moved followers to an 800-acre ranch in Shakahola Forest, where villages carried biblical names like Nazareth, according to AP.

Police uncovered the sect in April 2023 and exhumed more than 400 bodies over three weeks, most from shallow mass graves; the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights put the toll at 429 in 2024.

CBS News reports most died of starvation, though post-mortems found others suffered asphyxia, neck compression or traumatic head injury, and Justice Diana Kavedza said children were killed by hand where fasting did not produce death.

This is the first time Mackenzie has faced a verdict on the most serious murder charges, the BBC notes, and prosecutors called the trial one of Kenya's most consequential criminal cases.

The Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions welcomed the momentous verdict, with director Renson Ingonga telling reporters that a conviction on such counts does not come easily, per CBS News.

The verdict also landed amid calls for tougher regulation of religious organisations, after revelations that Mackenzie had been arrested twice before — in 2017 on radicalisation charges and in 2019 over child deaths — and released both times.

Relatives packed the Mombasa courtroom, many traveling from coastal communities to hear the ruling. Francis Wanje, 62, lost eight family members including his daughter and two grandchildren, telling AFP the ruling would be a lesson so such things never happen again, Al Jazeera and RFI report.

Stephen Mwiti, 48, told the BBC he lost all six of his children to the cult, and that his former wife was among those convicted. Survivor Peter Shukrani, rescued from the forest where his mother discarded his medicine, said he would have died had he stayed, the BBC reports.

Mackenzie and his co-accused face sentencing on November 6, where they face life in prison, AP and ABC report. Kenya retains the death penalty but has executed no one since 1987, and capital punishment is left to judicial discretion after a 2017 Supreme Court ruling, per AP.

Mackenzie also still faces separate manslaughter, terrorism, radicalisation and child torture charges tied to more than 230 additional deaths, and in January was charged over a further 52 bodies found at a nearby village, CBS News reports.

The defence has argued the case rests on circumstantial evidence and inconclusive forensics.