India: Women accused of being witches beaten to death

Bodies of the five women accused of being witches

Five women were on Saturday beaten to death by dozens of villagers in eastern India, on account of practicing witchcraft and blaming them for a series of misfortunes in the village, including the death of an infant earlier in the week.
Narrating the incident, the Deputy Inspector General of police in Ranchi, Arun Kumar Singh, said the residents of Kinjia village in Jharkhand state dragged the women out of their homes and beat them with sticks and iron rods.
Police have arrested around 50 people involved in the attack, Singh said. A large number of police officers have been deployed in the village to prevent any outbreak of violence.
Superstitious beliefs persist in many parts of India and have been behind similar attacks on women in Jharkhand. From 2000 to 2012, around 2 100 people, mostly women, were killed in India on suspicion of practising witchcraft, according to the National Crime Records Bureau. Last month, a woman in Assam was stripped naked and beheaded by a mob who accused her of being a witch.