Mr. Mackenzie, according to Mr. Katana, said that he would stay alive to help lead his followers to “meet Jesus” through starvation but that once this work was done, he, too, would starve himself to death ahead of what he said was the imminent end of the world.

In a video post online in March, Mr. Mackenzie said that he had “heard the voice of Christ telling me that ‘the work I gave you to preach End Time messages for nine years has come to an end.’”

Mr. Katana said he had by this time broken with Mr. Mackenzie and wasn’t in Shakahola when the suicide program started, but heard about it from believers who were. He went to the police to report that “kids are dying” in the forest.

“They never took any action until it was too late,” he said.

In April, Mr. Muendo, the former hawker who moved to Shakahola in 2021 with his family, telephoned his sister in Mombasa and told her that “we are starting a fast so that we can go to see Christ in Golgotha,” a reference to the site of Jesus’s crucifixion in the Bible.

“I told him: ‘I’m praying for you but we need you, so don’t crucify yourself,’” the sister, Ms. Syombua, said.

Mr. Muendo, according to his sister, asked her to understand that he had no choice but “to go through to the end.”

The sister said, “He was happy, because he thought he would be dying soon for Jesus.”

As for Mr. Mackenzie, she added, “he is a murderer.”