Patna: An angry mob of villagers cruelly lynched five tribal women in bordering Jharkhand state late Friday night on the suspicion of allegedly practising witchcraft in another brutal killing related to superstition in recent years. The police have arrested 50 people in connection with the massacre.
The blood-curdling incident took place at Kanjia village near Ranchi, the capital of Jharkhand state, some 350km south of Patna, sending panic waves in the area.
Police said the angry mob raided the village shortly past midnight, dragged the women out of their homes while they were asleep and beat them to death. After committing the crime, the mob, comprising youths, elderly people and also women, packed the bodies in five gunny bags and threw them outside the village. Police said the mob blamed the victims for the recent deaths of four people in the village.
“They [victims] were dragged out of their homes in the dead of night while they were asleep and brutally tortured before being beaten to death,” a spokesman of Jharkhand police, S.N. Pradhan, told Gulf News over phone on Saturday, adding some of the victims were even crushed to death by hard stones.
He said the entire village was involved in the crime and the police are now trying to identify the murderers. “Right now we have arrested some suspected who may be involved in the killing but can’t name them,” he said.
Witnesses said the victims were also undressed before being attacked with traditional weapons, such as bamboo canes, spears and swords. Many pleaded for mercy but the mob refused to listen to their appeals.
“They [attackers] were armed with sticks and sharp-edged weapons and killed the hostages one by one,” said the daughter of one of the victims, adding the mob refused to listen to her repeated appeals to spare her mother. “We cried, prayed for mercy but they did not move a bit. Instead they threatened to kill us if we dared to report the incident to the police,” she added.
What was even more strange was the fact that most of the villagers who were taken into police custody for being involved in the horrible crime showed no signs of remorse for these murders. “The law did not act against the women who killed our relatives by practising witchcraft but when we eliminated them to save the society from their curse we are being treated as criminals,” one of the accused youth in his 20s told the media soon after being taken into custody by the police which reached the spot in the aftermath of the massacre.
Reports said the crowd which was angry over the spate of mysterious deaths in the village lost their cool after reportedly finding a woman allegedly conducting sorcery rituals in the dead of night and beat her up. On the basis of information provided by her, the crowd later raided four other houses in the village and nabbed four women. They all were later done to death in cold blood.
A police report said more than 400 women have been killed in Jharkhand in the past 10 years on the charge of being “witches”.
The situation is no different in Bihar where around 700 women were assaulted, paraded through the streets and made to consume human excreta for allegedly being “witches” in the past two years. This year alone, more than 350 such cases of assaults on “witches” have been reported from across the state, underlining the gravity of the situation. Last year, 335 such cases had been reported.
