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http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/articles/2008/04/24/1208743100776.html?s_rid=w
ww:top5


KINSHASA - Police in Congo have arrested 13 suspected sorcerers accused of
using black magic to steal or shrink men's penises after a wave of panic
and attempted lynchings triggered by the alleged witchcraft.

Reports of so-called penis snatching are not uncommon in West Africa, where
belief in traditional religions and witchcraft remains widespread, and
where ritual killings to obtain blood or body parts still occur.

Rumours of penis theft began circulating last week in Kinshasa, Democratic
Republic of Congo's sprawling capital of some 8 million inhabitants. They
quickly dominated radio call-in shows, with listeners advised to beware of
fellow passengers in communal taxis wearing gold rings.

Purported victims, 14 of whom were also detained by police, claimed that
sorcerers simply touched them to make their genitals shrink or disappear,
in what some residents said was an attempt to extort cash with the promise
of a cure.

"You just have to be accused of that, and people come after you. We've
had a number of attempted lynchings. ... You see them covered in marks
after being beaten," Kinshasa's police chief, Jean-Dieudonne Oleko,
told Reuters on Tuesday.

Police arrested the accused sorcerers and their victims in an effort to
avoid the sort of bloodshed seen in Ghana a decade ago, when 12 suspected
penis snatchers were beaten to death by angry mobs. The 27 men have since
been released.

"I'm tempted to say it's one huge joke," Oleko said.

"But when you try to tell the victims that their penises are still
there, they tell you that it's become tiny or that they've become impotent.
To that I tell them, 'How do you know if you haven't gone home and tried
it'," he said.

Some Kinshasa residents accuse a separatist sect from nearby Bas-Congo
province of being behind the witchcraft in revenge for a recent government
crackdown on its members.

"It's real. Just yesterday here, there was a man who was a victim. We
saw. What was left was tiny," said 29-year-old Alain Kalala, who sells
phone credits near a Kinshasa police station.

Reuters

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