Five women have been beaten to death by dozens of villagers in India who accused them of practicing witchcraft and blamed them for a series of misfortunes in the area.

Residents of Kinjia village, around 40km (25 miles) from Jharkhand state capital Ranchi, dragged the women out of their homes and attacked them with sticks and iron rods on Saturday, said Arun Kumar Singh, a deputy inspector-general of police in Ranchi.

The attackers blamed the women for several accidents and misfortunes suffered by villagers, including the death of an infant in Kinjia earlier in the week, Singh said.

Jharkhand police spokesman S.N. Pradhan said the villagers also used stones and knives after blaming the five women for bringing illness, poor crops and bad luck on the village through witchcraft.

'It looks like the village held a grudge against these women for a very long time, holding them responsible for... various misfortunes,' Pradhan told AFP.

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Blood stains on the ground at the spot where the women were bludgeoned to death with sticks, iron rods, stones and knives
'The whole village is ganging up against the police now saying they all killed the women,' he said, adding that an investigation was underway.

Police have so far arrested around 50 people involved in the attack, mostly aged between 45 and 50. A large number of police officers have been deployed in the village to prevent any outbreak of violence.

Jharkhand's top elected official, Chief Minister Raghubar Das, condemned the incident. 'In the age of knowledge, this incident is sorrowful. Society should ponder over it,' he said in a statement.

Belief in witchcraft and the occult remains widespread in some impoverished and remote areas in India, where women are sometimes accused of being witches to settle disputes or grievances.

In some cases women are stripped naked as punishment, burnt alive or driven from their homes and killed.

Last month, machete-wielding villagers in the northeastern state of Assam dismembered and beheaded a 63-year-old woman after accusing her of being a witch and casting evil spells on her village.

According to India's National Crime Records Bureau, around 2,100 people, mostly women, were killed between 2000 and 2012 on suspicions of practising witchcraft.

Jharkhand accounted for 54 of 160 'witch hunt' murders in 2013, government data showed.

Some Indian states including Jharkhand have introduced special laws to try to curb crimes against people accused of witchcraft.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3190287/5-women-accused-witches-beaten-death-India.html

And they wonder why they can't attract women.

when your killing and raping them, yes...

Lets not forget raping them and then having their own family throw acid in their face... for being raped.

Witches lives matter.

and/or stupidity...

Wow!! This reminds me of the Salem witch burnings of the 1600s.

Meanwhile several hundred thousand people had their lives and rights stripped away based on the belief that a drug war is a good idea, sitting in federal and state prisons, for drug charges, and a million people are on big brother probation due to a drug charge.

And in the last 15 years some 30,000 civilians were killed in Afghanistan, and another 30,000 civilians were wounded.

Also, possibly 500,000 people died in the Iraq war based on a belief there were WMD's.

Those barbarous Indians and their superstitious beliefs killing those 5 people for stupid, fallacious, reasons!

well, if it makes you feel any better, "According to India's National Crime Records Bureau, around 2,100 people, mostly women, were killed between 2000 and 2012 on suspicions of practicing witchcraft"...

dead is dead, the reasons why isn't going to bring any of them back... and if your thinking Afghanistan is about drugs, you might wanna read up a bit.... it's about trillions of dollars in natural resources...

I hate it when people are obtuse.

^^^ I don't understand why people have a need to compare and weigh tragedies like one is worse than another, therefore, the one with fewer lives lost just shouldn't matter. The same way that since someone in a poor country has it worse than me, that is supposed to make me more thankful. No, it doesn't ease my suffering and minimize my pain because someone has it rougher. All it does is insult me by trivializing my pain, like my feelings shouldn't matter because I don't have it tough enough. The same way your post above is trivializing a news story because you don't feel there were enough lives lost in comparison to other lives.

Your post is insulting.

That post was addressing Ciretom.

Primitive beliefs spawn primitive actions.

Nuke it

they need "radiation free" mine sites...