430 Lives Claimed After Small Church Turned Out to Be a Cult

According to apnews.com, a small town in Kenya called “Malindi” was found to have 430 bodies right on the outskirts of town. A church called “Good News International,” was found to be linked with the deaths. The owner of said church, Paul Mackenzie  was taken into custody with suspicion of causing 191 children to die of starvation with the promise of meeting Jesus. He pled not guilty to the deaths, as he would be going to jail for life. He has several accounts of manslaughter being held over him.

As people investigated the area, they found several pits of shallow graves. Autopsies demonstrated that most of the deaths involved starvation, strangulation, or harm with a blunt object. The bodies were found by the grave digger Shukran Karisa Mangi, who said that he believes more mass graves are to be found. According to Kenya’s red cross, over 600 people have been reported missing and are suspected to be victims of the cult. 

The unsettling new behavior of the people started in 2019 when visitors unknown to the town refused to talk to the villagers and only mentioned that they were farmers. After this started happening regularly, the people in Malindi became suspicious, but nothing seemed to be wrong, so nothing ever came of it. Past street vendor and cab driver Paul Mackenzie, who had a high school education, had summoned these “farmers” to join his cult. He had gone to study under a Malindi preacher in 1990 and opened his own church in 2003. This was the rise to his fall, as he later became corrupt and caused a massacre that lasted for years. With bribery and the fear of God he got away with killing hundreds of innocent people, officially making this one of the most gruesome massacres in Kenyan history. ■