One Papua New Guinea woman was stripped, tortured, bound and burned alive on top of a pile of trash in front of a crowd on Thursday - because villagers claimed that she killed a 6-year-old boy through sorcery, The Global Post reported.
Villagers reportedly tortured the woman, Kepari Leniata, 20, with a branding iron, before they splashed her with fuel and set her on fire, AFP reported.
According to reports cited by AFP, the woman admitted to killing the boy, who died on Tuesday after being hospitalized with stomach and chest pains.
Police and firefighters attempted to intervene and stop the incident, but the mob outnumbered them, AFP reported. Police told AFP that they were treating the incident as a murder, and were preparing charges against those responsible.
Deputy Police Commissioner Simon Kauba, of the Western Highlands provincial capital of Mount Hagen, where the incident took place, was angry that police did not do anything to stop the incident. According to national police spokesperson Dominic Kakas, who spoke with USA Today, Kauba said the public failed to cooperate with the police, and the police did not work hard enough.
"He was very, very disappointed that there's been no arrest made as yet," Kakas told USA Today. "The incident happened in broad daylight in front of hundreds of eyewitnesses and yet we haven't picked up any suspects yet. He was very, very curious about that and he blasted the investigators on the phone."
Kakas called the Leniata's husband the "prime suspect," noting that the man fled the province - but he didn't know whether the husband had a relationship with the six-year-old boy's family, according to USA Today.
Police Commissioner Tom Kulunga called the murder "shocking and devilish," USA Today reported. "We are in the 21st century and this is totally unacceptable," he added.
He told USA Today that courts should be established to deal with sorcery allegations, instead of placing justice in the villagers' hands.
In Papua New Guinea, many do not accept natural causes as reasoning for misfortune, illness or death, attributing these occurrences to sorcery, according to AFP. The country introduced a Sorcery Act in 1971 to criminalize sorcery-related killings, but the Papua New Guinea law reform commission recently proposed to repeal it after they saw an increase in attacks on people who supposedly practiced black magic.
But the U.S. embassy in Port Moresby, the capital of Papua new Guinea, condemned the incident as a "brutal murder" and "pervasive gender-based violence," according to The Global Post.
Papua New Guinea prime minister Peter O'Neill also spoke out against the killing.
"No one commits such a despicable act in the society that all of us, including Kepari, belong to," O'Neill told The Global Post in a statement. "Barbaric killings connected with alleged sorcery. Violence against women because of this belief that sorcery kills. These are becoming all too common in certain parts of the country. It is reprehensible that women, the old and the weak in our society should be targeted for alleged sorcery or wrongs that they actually have nothing to do with."
This article is copyrighted by Travelers Today, the travel news leader
