Bahrain: Couple jailed for sorcery and blackmail appeal sentence
Victims were blackmailed over sex videos filmed by the wife
Abu Dhabi: A man and his wife, who have been sentenced to 10 and five years respectively for sorcery and blackmail, have appealed their sentence, the Bahrain Court of Appeals heard.
The 45-year-old wife was found guilty of telling victims they had to have sex with her husband in order to dispel evil forces residing within them.
The 47-year-old man’s modus operandi was that he would say he was able to ward off black magic contained in the victims’ bodies by getting intimate with them, according to court documents.
The documents showed once the victims agreed to the man’s wishes as they were scared of the consequences of the supposed black magic, the wife filmed the victims and the couple later blackmailed them over the sex videos.
The couple were arrested after one of their victims went through a mental breakdown that forced her to report the incident to the police along with the rest of the victims.
The sorcerers confessed to their crimes and that witchcraft was something that manifested money out of thin air. “There’s no limit to how much cash you can make by doing the magic stuff,” the man told the police.
But the couple ended up broke after they spent all their money on dream vacations, according to court documents.
Islam, as a religion, frowns upon superstition as a whole and practices involving witchcraft. To gauge how widespread belief in these supernatural forces is, the Pew Research Centre has conducted a survey asking Muslims from several different countries separate questions about witchcraft.
As far as witchcraft goes, 69 per cent of Indonesians were found to believe in its existence, far beyond Malaysia’s 49 per cent and Thailand’s 17 per cent.
