By adx
A plunge into the shadows of Shakahola Forest and the adjoining thickets reveals the true horror of Kenya’s darkest mass murder and the chilling realization that the forests of Kilifi still cradle brainwashed believers, carrying forward a deadly gospel
Beneath the relentless Kenyan coastal sun, the red earth of Shakahola Forest in Kilifi County still bleeds secrets, three years after the ground first cracked open like a rotten wound.
In 2023, investigators unearthed a nightmare of over 453 bodies, twisted in eternal agony. This was the handiwork of a doomsday cult, Good News International Ministry (GNIM), led by the now-indicted pastor Paul Mackenzie, which peddled self-afflicted starvation as a divine ticket to heaven.
The world recoiled as Kenya’s collective soul shuddered. For a fleeting moment, silence descended, heavy. But it was the deceptive lull.
Last year, in the sweltering heat of August/September, that silence was shattered once more in the nearby thickets of Kwa Binzaro village, a clearing in Chakama Forest, a mere 30 kilometers before you get to Shakahola from Malindi.
What began as hushed rumours exploded into a chilling revival, proving the cult’s venomous ideology didn’t die, but rather it mutated, slithered into hiding, and had struck again.
The alarm first pierced the air in July 2025, when a whistleblower’s desperate confession reached the public and authorities alike. Followers were vanishing into the bush, resuming their fatal fasts in secrecy.
Later in the month a Malindi court gave the green light for exhumations, unleashing the Directorate of Criminal Investigations (DCI) Homicide Unit into the sandy wilderness. What they have found wasn’t just echoes of the past but a grotesque escalation.
Initial probes revealed seven suspicious mounds, barely veiled by loose soil, disturbed by prowling hyenas and feral dogs that had feasted on the exposed remains. By August 21, forensic teams had clawed out five intact bodies from six graves, plus ten fragmented parts strewn across the blood-red clearing.
But the horror deepened as authorities tallied more graves that turned out fresh bodies, buried mere weeks ago, alongside scattered limbs, heads and torsos, gnawed and dispersed by scavengers.
Police admitted failures raging from intelligence gaps, botched coordination, and a sluggish response that allowed the cult to flourish unchecked in Kilifi County.
A few weeks before the exhumations started, four emaciated survivors were rescued from Kwa Binzaro area. Shockingly, among them was a husband-and-wife survivors pulled alive from Shakahola in April 2023, rehabilitated and released, only to be ensnared anew by the cult’s siren call. They went back to finish what they started.
To grasp Kwa Binzaro’s tragedy, rewind to Shakahola’s genesis. GNIM’s sermons painted apocalypse in vivid strokes, urging devotees to sell worldly possessions, forsake homes, and starve in the forest’s embrace. Guards enforced the fast with iron resolve, watching as families withered, toddlers gasping their last, and the elderly crumbling into dust.
Arrested for murder, terrorism, and child abuse, the Shakahola suspects languish in remand, proclaiming innocence. But it is clear now that their influence endures like a phantom limb.
Locals in Bofu, Bungale, and ADC Ranch swear many evaded the 2023 raids, dissolving into the foliage to continue their grim rites. “They’re still out there,” insists villager Simon Menza, his voice laced with dread.
When the ADX team joined Menza and another villager, Dickson Ngumbao, known locally as “Chafua”, on a trek into the forests bordering Shakahola, what we found was disturbing. We found makeshift shelters built from branches and tarpaulins, clothes scattered, cooking pots overturned in haste, and patches of disturbed soil raised slightly like unmarked mounds.
The police froze. One officer shook his head, forbidding us from digging. But the silence of that moment, the stillness of the ground, felt like a held breath. We left, but the memory stayed. It felt as if eyes were watching us from behind the thorny bushes.
Haunting these tales is “Rasta,” the cult’s ghostly enforcer, described by locals as a machete-wielding phantom who once menaced rescuers in Shakahola.
Villagers recount chilling brushes even after Shakahola rescues. A charcoal burner recounted encountering the mythical Rasta in ADC farm, months after the rescues. “He’s myth and monster,” Menza confesses.
Other stories ripple through the villages. In Shakahola trading center, a businessman Suleiman Osman claims one of his herders was killed months after the rescues.
“I believe he found them, and they killed him so that he could not report,” Osman says. He lodged a report with authorities, but to this day, he has received no update.
In Bofu village, neighbouring Shakahola Forest, charcoal burners talked of stumbling upon two emaciated men in the forest. Locals assumed they were cult remnants, fasting. Police later dismissed them as “street boys from Mombasa.” The contradiction only deepened mistrust between the community and the state.
“The government insists it’s all over in Shakahola,” Ngumbao declared last year in an interview with ADX, his voice laced with foresight. “But these people are still hiding in the forest.”
“They are still there,” said Menza. “There are graves beyond Shakahola. But the Government does not want you to see them.” How eerily prescient his words rang last year as Kwa Binzaro’s blood-soaked sands yield a fresh harvest of horror?
In Malindi town, families of 419 children, women and men who perished in “Shakahola One” still await DNA results in limbo, their grief compounded by bureaucratic sludge. After the initial DNA testing, only 34 bodies were released to the families for burial.
“Shameful,” says Victor Kaudo of the Malindi Community Human Rights Centre. “How many must rot before we act?
Mackenzie’s trial crawls onward, DNA backlogs piling up, Kwa Binzaro’s influx threatening to overwhelm the system.
What began as a delusion now reveals a hydra of severed heads regrowing in adjacent forests, ideology spreading like wildfire among remnants. A rescued survivor from Siaya reportedly became Kwa Binzaro’s new ringleader, sneaking back to perpetuate the madness.
What Kwa Binzaro is painfully confirming is that Shakahola was not finished, rather it festers in Kilifi’s soil, in survivors’ haunted eyes, in Kwa Binzaro’s fresh pits, and that the cult endures, a contagion defying eradication, luring more to its starving embrace.