By Jefferson Kahinju, Nelson Aruya and Edwin Okoth
MALINDI, Kenya, Nov 5 (Reuters) – When Kenyan starvation cult leader Paul Mackenzie is sentenced on Friday for the murders of 190 children and an adult, Stephen Mwiti and other relatives of the victims will be worrying he may continue spreading his deadly messages.
Mwiti says all six of his children died in the Shakahola Forest, where his wife took them in 2022. Prosecutors said Mackenzie ordered followers to starve themselves and their children to death to go to heaven before the world ended, in what became one of the worst cult-related tragedies in recent history.
Mwiti said he hoped that Mackenzie and his fellow defendants, who include Mwiti’s wife, would be held in solitary confinement if they were jailed, so they could not influence other prisoners.
“Even if he were to be hanged, I will never see my children again,” Mwiti, 48, told Reuters this week while visiting his son Samuel’s grave in the coastal city of Malindi.
Samuel, who was around seven years old when they entered the forest, was the only one of Mwiti’s children whose remains could be identified. Many of the victims’ bodies were severely decomposed, with officials only able to confirm the identities of 26 of the more than 400 bodies recovered from the forest.
CULT LEADER’S FOLLOWERS CONTINUED TO PROMOTE HIS IDEAS
Mackenzie and 28 co-defendants were convicted last month of murder. They could face the death penalty, although Kenya has not executed anyone in decades.
Most of the defendants, including Mwiti’s wife, denied the charges and Mackenzie said he did not force anyone to starve, an argument that Mwiti said made no sense.
“Assuming the adults he had converted agreed to fast without being forced, what about the children? The post mortem even revealed that … Samuel died after being strangled. Was that also by will?” Mwiti said.
After Mackenzie was arrested, officials said his followers continued to promote his ideas.
Last year, authorities discovered dozens more bodies in a nearby village, which they linked to Mackenzie’s cult.
FATHER HOLDS ON TO MEMORIES OF HIS CHILDREN
Four years after he last saw his children, Mwiti is haunted by their absence.
“When I leave work and come across children, I get startled,” Mwiti said. “At times, a child looks so much like one of my children that it shocks me.”
At the cemetery, where Samuel is buried beneath a wooden cross, Mwiti held photographs of his children and some of their former school uniforms that he had hoped to bury with them.
“These are all the memories I have left,” he said.
(Reporting by Jefferson Kahinju and Nelson Aruya; Writing by Vincent Mumo Nzilani; Editing by Aaron Ross and Philippa Fletcher)
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