A mother took the stand at the High Court in Mombasa this week and described watching her children die after enforcers locked them in a room for seven days without food or water, testimony that laid bare the horrors allegedly carried out at the Kwa Binzaro settlement in Kilifi County.
The witness, identified as L.A., delivered her account before Lady Justice Wendy Kagendo during the ongoing Kwa Binzaro murder trial, a case directly connected to the wider investigation into cult-linked deaths in the Shakahola forest.
Enforcers Beat Children Who Tried to Escape
L.A. told the court that the settlement operated under brutal enforcement. Armed individuals actively tracked down weakened children who attempted to flee in search of food or water, capturing and beating them to deter others from trying to escape. She identified six of the accused, who were present in court, confirming she had seen them at Kwa Binzaro during the period under investigation.
She described how what began as a faith-driven journey rapidly descended into a deadly ordeal for her and her family, one she could not escape and from which her children did not survive.
Father from Siaya Recounts Children’s Final Hours
L.A.’s testimony corroborates the account of another witness, J.O., a father from Siaya County who joined preacher Paul Mackenzie’s followers in 2019 after watching his televised sermons. Those radical teachings persuaded J.O. to pull his children out of school and relocate his entire family to Shakahola in 2020.
What awaited them was a tightly controlled environment where the group’s leadership imposed prolonged, mandatory fasting on members. As the community moved to isolated camps near Malindi, the instructions grew more extreme as followers received directives to fast until death.
In one of the most distressing moments of the hearing, J.O. identified several of the accused as guards who enforced these rules within Kwa Binzaro. He then recounted the final days of his six children, describing their desperate cries for food and water before they died of starvation.
52 Bodies Recovered from the Site
Senior Sergeant Livingstone Lihanda, a crime scene officer who documented the homesteads and supervised the exhumation process, told the court that investigators recovered 52 bodies from Kwa Binzaro. The remains ranged from skeletal fragments to body parts found in varying stages of decomposition.
A forensic report dated March 2, 2026, added further grim detail; forensic teams identified at least two separate graves that each contained the remains of three individuals, pointing to the scale and organized nature of the burials.
Mackenzie Allegedly Directed Operations from Prison
Prosecutors allege that Paul Mackenzie orchestrated the Kwa Binzaro deaths from behind bars, operating through a breakaway cell to continue the deadly practices that first came to light in the Shakahola forest.
Authorities discovered the Kwa Binzaro site, located roughly 30 kilometres from Shakahola, after uncovering shallow graves containing dozens of victims. The prosecution maintains that suspects used radical religious teachings to lure followers to the site, where forced fasting and physical abuse became the tools of control.
The trial continues, with the court set to hear from additional survivors and forensic experts as prosecutors work to establish the full scale of one of Kenya’s most disturbing mass death investigations.
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