India: Man chops off woman’s head, carries it to police station
Says she was a witch and blames her for killing his son
Patna: A man from the Jharkhand state of eastern India beheaded a woman and then carried her head to the nearest police station before telling officers she killed his son by practicing witchcraft.
The hair-raising incident took place at Mehandipur village in the Sahibganj district on Wednesday. Police arrested the man.
Reports said a 25-year-old identified as Swadhin Tuddu, son of the accused Sakal Tuddu, 57, had died from a cough and cold three days earlier but the latter suspected the hand of the woman, Matlu Chaurai, in his death. He suspected that his son had died only because of black magic practiced by her.
On Tuesday night, Sakal, accompanied by villagers, raided the house of the 55-year-old woman who was asleep along with her husband and daughter and chopped off her head with a sharp-edged weapon. Her family didn’t react due to to fear of being attacked.
The next morning, he walked to the nearest police station while clutching the severed head in one hand and the weapon in the other, and surrendered before the police. “This woman had killed my young son by practicing witchcraft but I have avenged his death. Please arrest me,” the accused told the policemen present at the station.
Witnesses said the policemen on duty were terrified by what they saw before they mustered the courage and took him into custody. Based on the information provided by him, the police rushed to the scene of the crime and recovered the body of the woman.
The accused told the police that the woman had told his son he would die in the evening and her words proved true. He didn’t perform his son’s last rites and kept his body at home until he took revenge for his death.
“The youth had died from some ailments but Tuddu believed he died since the woman had cast black magic spell. We have arrested the man and further investigation is on,” local deputy superintendent of police Arvind Kumar Singh told the media on Thursday.
He sought for a need for an intensive awareness campaign against witch-hunting. In 2015, five women were stoned to death in Ranchi, the capital of Jharkhand state after which 13 people convicted for the cold-blooded killing were sentenced to life imprisonment by a local court.
According to reports, a total of 228 women have been killed in Jharkhand in the past six years over witchcraft allegations. In December 2017, the home ministry informed the Rajya Sabha that as many as 183 women were killed in Jharkhand since 2014. An official report of the Jharkhand police department now says 27 women were killed in 2019 and 18 in 2018 over the same charges, thus taking the toll to 228.