Children were targeted as the first to be starved to death in the final days of a Christian doomsday cult in Kenya, new and harrowing information has revealed. A former deputy preacher of the cult, Titus Kantana, is helping police with the ongoing investigation. He revealed there was a methodical plan for mass suicide through starvation with children being the first to be targeted to “fast in the sun so they would die faster.”
Speaking to the Sunday Times, he said children were shut in huts for five days without food or water. He said: “Then they wrapped them in blankets and buried them, even the ones still breathing.”
The leader of a Christian cult in Kenya, Pastor Paul Nthenge Macenzie, remains in custody as police continue the exhumation of bodies found in mass graves on his land where currently 201 bodies have been found in a forest in the nation’s southeast.
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Official autopsies of some of the bodies found in Shakahola farm, near the coastal town of Malindi, found signs of starvation, suffocation and beatings.
More than 600 people reported to be members of the doomsday cult allegedly led by Pastor Paul Mackenzie are still missing. He says he closed down his Good News International Church four years ago after nearly two decades of operation.
In an interview with Kenya’s Daily Nation newspaper a few weeks ago, Pastor Mackenzie also denied he had forced his followers to starve themselves.
It is alleged that the cult followers were told they would reach heaven faster if they starved to death. The BBC has uncovered hundreds of Pastor Paul Mackenzie’s sermons online.
Themes of sermons included the idea that “education is evil” and “not recognised in the bible”. In 2017 and again in 2018, he was arrested for encouraging children not to go to school.
He also encouraged mothers to avoid seeking medical attention during childbirth and not to vaccinate their children, claiming doctors “serve a different God.” The church’s online content also features posts about the end of the world, impending doom, and the supposed dangers of science.
Police across the country have been questioning other religious leaders whose teachings are believed to be misleading and contrary to basic human rights.