Six children, aged between one and sixteen, starved to death inside a locked room in Kwa Bi Nzaro forest in early April 2025, as their parents listened helplessly from an adjacent room and guards outside flogged the dying for crying out. Their mother, identified only as L.A., has now told the Mombasa High Court how a single phone call from imprisoned preacher Paul Mackenzie set the entire tragedy in motion - a call in which he claimed to carry the spirits of those who had already died in the Shakahola Forest massacre and warned that no one could hide from him.
A Call From Prison That Became a Death Sentence
Mackenzie made contact with L.A. and her husband J.O. through J.O.'s mobile phone in January 2024, while he was already in custody at Shimo La Tewa Maximum Prison. The call was not merely a message of faith. It was a threat. Mackenzie told L.A. that he possessed the spirits of everyone who had died in Shakahola, and that he could see them regardless of where they fled. For a couple who had previously been inside Shakahola and narrowly survived the earlier mass deaths, the message carried a terror that was both personal and visceral. They had met Mackenzie face to face. He knew them. And he was reaching them again.
That psychological hold was reinforced at a three-day seminar held between February 27 and March 1 in Matayos, Busia County, organised through Mackenzie's network and led by self-styled priestess Sharleen Temba Anindo. More than twenty people attended. Mackenzie addressed them remotely via loudspeaker from his prison cell, speaking for over thirty minutes, naming attendees individually. The message was consistent and absolute: fasting to death was the only path to heaven and to meeting Jesus.
This is a documented feature of high-control religious movements - the use of absolute theological framing to eliminate rational alternatives. When a believer is told that death is the only passage to salvation, and when that belief is reinforced through communal ritual, personal address from an authority figure, and social isolation, the conditions for mass compliance are established without physical coercion being the primary mechanism. Fear, faith, and belonging do the work that chains cannot.
The Forest, the Locked Room, and the Children Who Cried for Water
L.A., her husband, and their six children left Siaya on March 31 after selling their household belongings. They arrived in Malindi the following day, where Anindo and an associate named Kazungu Kahindi Garama received them, housed them briefly on the outskirts of town, and transported them into the forest after dark. They arrived around 7 pm and were placed in a mud-walled house inside a fenced compound. The door was locked from the outside. A single four-litre jerrican was provided for use inside the room.
The children were held in separate rooms. The parents could hear them but could not reach them. When the children cried from hunger and thirst, guards outside beat them and prayed aloud: "Jesus, help these people complete their journey; they should not get stuck on the way." When L.A. demanded water for her children or permission to fetch it herself, a man identified as Tom Ochieng' Mkonwe assaulted her and ordered her to be silent. Children who grew strong enough in their desperation to attempt escape were pursued through the forest, caught, and severely beaten - punishment designed, in the court's account, to deter further attempts and maintain order among the dying.
The first two children, aged one and three, died on April 3. A third died on April 5, a fourth on April 7. On April 8, Mackenzie called again and urged the parents to let the children continue fasting: "They are about to complete the journey. They have come from far." The fifth child died on April 9. The youngest surviving child, the second-born, died on April 15. L.A. told the court she heard her daughter cry out for her father before going silent. When she was permitted to view the body, she saw the neck was twisted - a detail she offered as evidence of possible strangulation.
All six children were buried in the thicket. By April 15, they were gone.
Evidence Concealment and the Architecture of a Second Atrocity
Chief Inspector Timothy Bett of the Crime Scene Processing Unit testified that investigators exhumed thirty bodies from nineteen graves and recovered one hundred and two body parts scattered across the Kwa Bi Nzaro site. Forensic examination and association of these remains established a total of fifty-two deaths. The victims were overwhelmingly children, the youngest as young as six months, recorded by investigators using grave reference numbers because so many remained unidentified.
The burial methods bore the marks of deliberate concealment. Graves were dug to a depth of less than two feet - shallow enough that decomposition would accelerate and scavengers could access and disperse the remains. Grave entrances were covered with thorny branches and positioned within dense bush. Unlike the mass burial sites at Shakahola, which were located near the structures where victims had lived, the graves at Kwa Bi Nzaro were dug approximately five hundred metres from the fasting compound. The first grave was found at precisely that distance. Bett told the court this was not accidental: "This was a carefully planned scheme to conceal evidence of death."
The contrast with Shakahola is significant. The perpetrators had learned from the earlier exposure. When satellite imagery, aerial surveillance, and media attention eventually uncovered the Shakahola burials in 2023, it was partly because the scale and proximity of the graves to identifiable structures made concealment impossible. At Kwa Bi Nzaro, those lessons had been absorbed and applied. The operation was smaller, more dispersed, and deliberately harder to trace.
Indoctrination, Coercion, and the Limits of Consent
J.O., testifying alongside his wife, offered an account of his own decision-making that complicates any simple narrative of voluntary faith. He told the court that after attending the Matayos seminar and eating food prepared by Anindo, he lost his capacity for independent judgment. He believed the food had been laced with something that altered his mental state. "I believed I was going to heaven," he said. After the deaths of his children, he told the court, a spirit came to him with a contrary message: the children were not in heaven. "I don't want to meet Jesus any more. I believe the decision to go to the forest was not entirely ours."
Whether or not the food was chemically adulterated - a matter for forensic investigation the court has not yet fully resolved in published testimony - J.O.'s account reflects a broader truth about cultic coercion. The mechanisms that draw people into high-control environments rarely operate through brute force alone. They operate through exhaustion, isolation, financial dependency, prior trauma, and the steady erosion of the capacity to imagine any life outside the group. L.A. and J.O. had already been inside Shakahola. They had survived it. And they returned - because Mackenzie's network had structured their entire social and spiritual world around his authority, and because he knew how to reach them at their most vulnerable, from a prison cell, on a telephone.
Mackenzie, Anindo, Garama, Mkonwe, Julius Thuva Luwali, and Johnson Gona Richard face twenty-three counts of murder as crimes against humanity in connection with the fifty-two deaths at Kwa Bi Nzaro forest. Prosecutors allege the killings formed part of a widespread and systematic attack against followers of the Good News International church between January and October 2025. Two additional accused, Mutua and James, face charges as accessories after the fact. The trial continues at the Mombasa High Court.
