MOMBASA, Kenya — When her parents denied her food and water for eight days, the girl said, she knew she was going to die, just like her two younger siblings. For days, her parents had beaten her when they caught her sipping water or looking for food. Famished and frail, she said they dressed her in special attire worn for death.
“The children were not supposed to eat, so they could die,” the child, a 9-year-old identified only as EG and hidden inside a witness protection booth, told a packed courtroom Thursday in the coastal Kenyan city of Mombasa. She was among the first witnesses to testify last week in the manslaughter trial of Paul Nthenge Mackenzie, an evangelical pastor accused of commanding members of his church to starve their children and themselves to death in order to meet Jesus in the end times. Advertisement The pastor and 93 other defendants, including his top associates and some of his followers, denied the manslaughter allegations and pleaded not guilty at the start of the trial.
In three other courts, Mackenzie and several of the other suspects are facing separate charges of murder, terrorism, and child torture and abuse. Earlier this year, the Kenyan government declared Mackenzie’s church, Good News International Ministries, “an organized criminal group.” Since April last year, 429 bodies have been exhumed from shallow graves in the Shakahola Forest in southeastern Kenya, where members of the doomsday cult lived, authorities said.
While some died.