SATAN’S OWN COUNTRY?

KERALA/ HUMAN SACRIFICE

- Jeemon Jacob

Kerala has always been a land of incongruities, with revolution and superstition living side by side in a state that claims to have achieved 100 per cent literacy long ago. Nor is it a stranger to bizarre cases involving sordid sex or murder. But last week's shocker at Elanthoor in Pathanamthitta district, where two women were killed as part of a human sacrifice’, with cannibalism being alleged, rocked even the more resolute among god's own citizens.

Confessions of the main accused, alleged black magic practitioner Mohammed Shafi, 52, revealed that he lured two women lottery vendors— Padmam, 52, from Ernakulam, and Sicily, 50, from Kalady— and took them to the house of local healer Bhagaval Singh, 64, and his second wife Laila, 57, in Elanthoor, where they were beheaded and their bodies chopped into several parts in a ritual sacrifice for the couple’s prosperity.