Foreign
Self-Proclaimed Kenyan Pastor Arraigned In Court For Terrorism After 400 Followers Starved To Death “To Meet Jesus”
A self-proclaimed Pastor, Paul Nthenge Mackenzie and the leader of a starvation cult has been charged with terrorism by the Kenyan Court.
Mackenzie, who was charged over the deaths of more than 400 of his followers, was also charged with “organised criminal activity”, according to documents from the Mombasa court seen by AFP.
The cult leader and 94 other suspects pleaded “not guilty” to charges of radicalisation.
It was alleged that Mackenzie incited his acolytes to starve to death in order to “meet Jesus” in a case that provoked horror across the world.
A Kenyan judge had on Wednesday ordered Mackenzie and 30 associates to undergo mental health evaluations before being charged with the murder of 191 children whose bodies have been exhumed since last April from the Shakahola forest.
Prosecutors say they will charge 95 people in total on counts of murder, manslaughter, terrorism and torture.
A lawyer for Mackenzie, who has been in custody since police started unearthing bodies in the forest, has said the self-styled pastor is cooperating with the investigation.
During a hearing in the coastal town of Malindi, a judge granted a prosecution request to conduct mental health assessments of the 31 defendants before they are formally charged and enter pleas in two weeks.
Mackenzie, dressed in a white-and-blue-striped polo shirt, sat largely expressionless alongside his fellow defendants in the courtroom.
Prosecutors have attributed delays in bringing charges to the gruelling and delicate task of locating, exhuming and autopsying so many human remains. Some of Mackenzie’s other followers were rescued, emaciated, from the forest.
People with knowledge of the cult’s activities told Reuters last year that Mackenzie planned the mass starvation in three phases: first children, then women and young men, and finally the remaining men.
A former taxi driver, Mackenzie forbade cult members from sending their children to school and from going to hospital when they were ill, branding such institutions as Satanic, some of his followers said.
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