Family of Six Mobbed To Death After Witchcraft Accusations

 

According to a report from the  police in Eastern India, an Indian couple and their four children fell victims to jungle justice as they were lynched by an angry mob of villagers. The victims were accused of engaging in witchcraft and bringing illness upon children.

 

The family who stayed in a mud house in the hamlet of Lahanda in Keonjhar district, were sleeping during which they were attacked by a blood-hungry group of five people with axes. The police has traced the crime to the relatives of the family who accused them of causing illnesses suffered by infants in the village.

District Superintendent of Police Kavita Jalan said two surviving children alerted authorities. The police reached the village in the early hours of Monday to find the mutilated bodies in pools of blood, an axe abandoned inside the hut, and a young boy still alive.

"The eight-year-old boy was found by police gasping between the dead bodies," Jalan told Thomson Reuters Foundation, adding that a search was being conducted to find the suspects, who had fled the village after the incident.

The practice of branding men and women as witches and assaulting or killing them remains common is some parts of India, particularly among tribal communities, despite there being a law against it.

There were 160 cases of murders linked to witch hunts in 2013, and 119 in 2012, data from the National Crime Records Bureau shows.