29 Alleged Papua New Guinea Cannibals Charged with Killing 7 over Sorcery Fees

Papua New Guinea police arrested 29 members of an alleged cannibal cult and charged them with the murder of at least seven suspected witch doctors.

“They don’t think they’ve done anything wrong; they admit what they’ve done openly,” Madang Police Commander Anthony Wagambie told The Associated Press in a report published The Telegraph of London.

The alleged cannibals — eight of whom are women — ate their victims’ brains raw and made soup from their penises, according to the report. The 29 people were part of a group of about 1,000 who are against the sorcerers charging increasingly higher fees, the AFP news service reported.

{snip}

To hire a witch doctor to reveal a cause of death or cast out an evil spirit, one must pay 1,000 kina ($475) cash, AFP reported, along with a pig and a bag of rice, but some sorcerers were also asking for sex as payment.

“It’s against our traditional ethics and morals for a sorcerer to have intercourse with a man’s wife or teenage daughter,” a local cult leader in the Tangi area, inland from Madang province on Papua New Guinea’s northeast coast, said, according to AFP.

{snip}