Monthly Archives: January 2021

A shocking ritual murder in Tharaka Nithi County, Kenya

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Warning: the graphic contents of the following articles may shock readers.
(webmaster FVDK).

Girl’s severed head found in ‘witch doctor’s’ house

Published: January 19, 2021
By: The Star, Kenya – By Cyrus Ombati and Gerald Mutehia   

In Summary 

•Residents at a church at Magutuni said they heard screams from the girl, so they rushed to the scene, a so-called ‘witch doctor’s’ house.

• She had been slaughtered, and so had a goat. The men were feasting on meat – whose?

A headless goat’s carcass found at the home of the alleged witchdoctor at Mpingu village

Police are holding a suspected witch doctor and his client after a nine-year-old girl was beheaded and her heart cut out in a ritual murder in Tharaka Nithi.

When police arrived on Sunday afternoon, they said they found two men – a ‘traditional healer’ and his client – eating meat. It was not clear if it was human flesh, a beheaded sacrificial goat or a chicken whose hearts had been ripped out.

The girl was a milkmaid who regularly delivered milk and was seeking payment.

Congregants from a nearby church said they had reprimanded Suleiman Mati Mukira 94, from Mpingu village, Kiroo sub-location and his client. The police report also named Mukira.

Congregants heard the girls’ screams, raised the alarm and rushed to the scene.

The body in a gunny bag and the severed head were recovered from the witch doctor’s home on Sunday afternoon.

Police said they demanded to be shown the girl who screamed and was shown a girl’s headless torso.

The homeowner told police his client had slaughtered the girl as a sacrifice.

Police identified the girl as Deborah Kagendi Kinengeni who had delivered milk to the homestead. 

The men turned violent when police were called to the scene and conducted a search leading to more discoveries.

The body of the child was found hidden in a goat shed. The head was found nearby.

Police said they also found slaughtered chickens whose hearts had been ripped out. 

Eastern head of DCI Jeremiah Ikiao said they are trying to establish if the murder was isolated or part of serial ritual murders.

“It looks like a ritual but we will know more as investigators work on the incident,” he said. The remains of the girl were moved to the mortuary.

Police plan to produce the two in court and seek time to hold them while they conduct investigations.

“OCS Magutuni, DCI officers and SCPC Maara rushed to the scene and found the child having been killed. Her body was concealed in a goat shed, her head was cut off and placed outside the goat shed.

“Outside the compound was a slaughtered goat. Inside Mukira’s house was a slaughtered chicken and witchcraft items,” a police report seen by the Star reads.

Preliminary observation has shown that the girl’s heart was missing, police said. Witchcraft paraphernalia were found nearby. Police collected two blood-stained pangas.

Police at Ntumu station are holding the suspects as they investigate.

The body was taken to Chuka Hospital morgue for a postmortem.

(Edited by V. Graham)

Source: Girl’s severed head found in ‘witch doctor’s’ house

Related articles:

Kenya: Murdered Tharaka Nithi Girl Victim of Ritual Sacrifice

Published: January 19, 2021
By: Nation Media Group, Kenya – Alex Njeru

A key suspect in Sunday’s bizarre murder of a nine-year-old girl from Mpingu village in Maara Sub-county, Tharaka Nithi County, has claimed that he was offering a sacrifice to a witchdoctor.

In a shocking revelation to the parents of the murdered girl at Chogoria Police Station where the 32-year-old man is in custody, he said he had been directed to sacrifice a girl, goat and a chicken and surrender the hearts so that he could be protected from his relatives “who were planning to kill him”.

The suspect is being held together with the alleged 94-year-old witchdoctor. The suspect from Kariakomo village in Ganda ward, and who is a frequent visitor of the old man according to villagers, confessed that he killed a white chicken, a goat and the girl; whom the old man called from a nearby church.

Addressing the media, Maara Sub-county Police Commander Mohammed Jarso said the hearts of the slaughtered goat and chicken were missing but that of the girl was intact.

“The girl was beheaded but no part of the body was missing,” said Mr Jarso.

Police said the suspected witchdoctor claimed that his client turned violent and killed the goat and chicken before turning on the girl, who was picking some passion fruits at his farm.

Pick a bottle

He claimed that he had called the girl to pick a bottle that she had used to deliver some milk to him in the morning.

Mr Jarso said the matter is still under investigation, but added that the key suspect could be suffering from mental illness.

According to police, the old man reported the murder.

The villagers, among them worshippers at the Full Gospel Church led by Ms Josephine Mpuria, however claim that he rushed to the police after sensing danger from the residents who were threatening to lynch the two.

Ms Mpuria said the old man has been suspected of practicing witchcraft for a long time, but most of his customers come from far-off places.

‘Witch-doctor’

“Everybody in the village knows the old man as a witch-doctor and it has never been a secret,” said Ms Mpuria. She added that they suspect the old man has been demanding human sacrifices from his clients, and asked the police to conduct thorough investigations including searching his houses and farm.

Mr Evans Mawira, the girl’s brother, said that, when asked what had happened, the old man told him that he was ready to give him his only dairy cow in exchange for the girl.

“When I pushed the old man from where he was sitting down, I discovered the head of my sister and screamed in shock,” said Mawira.

Mr Ignatius Mutunga, the girl’s father, who received news of the heinous act while in Nairobi where he works, pleaded for justice to be done noting that the old man should not try to exonerate himself from the crime.

He said that, although he had been hearing that the old man is a witchdoctor, he has been selling milk to him and his children delivered it when they were not in school.

“I have lost my loving daughter and I am pleading for justice,” said Mr Mutunga.

The incident has left the villagers in shocked.

The two are expected to be arraigned in Chuka today (Tuesday).

Source: Kenya: Murdered Tharaka Nithi Girl Victim of Ritual Sacrifice

and:

Tharaka Nithi girl’s head severed in suspected ritual killing

The scene in Maara Sub-county, Tharaka Nithi County, where a girl was found dead on January 17, 2021, in a suspected case of a ritual killing.

Published: January 19, 2021
By: Nation Media Group, Kenya – Alex Njeru  

A suspected witchdoctor and his client were Sunday arrested in Maara Sub-county, Tharaka Nithi County, for allegedly killing a nine-year-old girl for a ritual.

In the incident at Magutuni, people worshipping at the nearby Full Gospel Church said they heard a girl’s cries but initially didn’t pay much attention to them.

They said that after completing the service, they decided to find out what had happened so they went to the alleged witchdoctor’s home.

There they reportedly found the 94-year-old and his client eating meat but were quickly shown a slaughtered goat.

Suspicious behaviour

The people said they then demanded to know where the girl the suspected witchdoctor had earlier called from the church was.

Resident James Mutembei said the girl delivered milk to the old man every day for pay. 

The residents said that upon asking about the Grade Two pupil’s whereabouts, the man and his client turned violent, prompting them to call police.

Mr Mutembei said that when police arrived, their search found the girl’s severed head hidden in a chicken coop.

When the police officers forced the two to show them the body, they were led to one of the houses in the compound, the residents said.

They added that they also found three slaughtered chickens with missing hearts.

“The old man, who is a known witchdoctor in the village, called the girl and asked her to collect some bottles. That is when the two slaughtered her and ate her heart,” Mr Mutembei claimed.

Police report

The suspects were taken to Ntumu Police Station and a probe opened.

A report from Magutuni Police Station gave a different account as reported by the 94-year-old, whom police said is a witchdoctor from Mpingu village, Kiroo.

The report says that in his report filed at the station,  he told police that his client went to his home and attacked the girl. 

The report says the girl’s body was found hidden in a goat shed, her head outside the shed and a slaughtered goat outside the compound.

Police said that inside the old man’s house was a slaughtered chicken and items used for witchcraft.

They collected two stained machetes from the scene.

The girl’s body was taken to Chuka mortuary .

Source: Tharaka Nithi girl’s head severed in suspected ritual killing

And: 

Village elder Mpingu narrates horrible murder of 9-year-old girl in Tharaka Nithi County – YouTube (video) – click here 

Tharaka Nithi County, Kenya

South Africa: staggering number of children murdered each year

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The story presented below is not about ritual killing, or muti murders, as these crimes based on superstition and witchcraft are called in Southern Africa. It’s about the violent death of children including muti murder, however. 

As stated in the article below, “According to official figures, around 1,000 children are murdered every year in South Africa, nearly three a day. But that statistic, horrific as it may be, may be an undercount.”.

The same applies for muti murders. The muti cases known are just the top of the iceberg.

For this reason I have decided to include the following article which was originally published by Associated Press (webmaster FVDK).

In South Africa, child homicides show violence ‘entrenched’

Mourners look at the body of 5-year-old Wandi Zitho at his funeral in Orange Farm, South Africa, on April 28, 2020. The boy was murdered in a suspected witchcraft ritual and his body was found in his neighbor’s tavern. (AP Photo/Bram Janssen)

Published: December 22, 2020
By: KSAT.com / Associated Press – Gerald Imray And Bram Janssen

CAPE TOWN – At night, Amanda Zitho worries her little boy is shivering and cold in his coffin and yearns to take him a blanket. She knows Wandi’s dead and gone and it’s senseless, but that doesn’t stop the ache. 

Wandi was 5 when he was killed in April, allegedly strangled with a rope by a Johannesburg neighbor — another dead child in a land where there are too many. 

According to official figures, around 1,000 children are murdered every year in South Africa, nearly three a day. But that statistic, horrific as it is, may be an undercount.

Shanaaz Mathews thinks many more children are victims of homicides that are not investigated properly, not prosecuted or completely missed by authorities. The official figures are “just the tip of the iceberg,” said Mathews, the director of the Children’s Institute at the University of Cape Town and probably the country’s leading expert on child homicides. 

In a country where more than 50 people are murdered every day, children are not special and are not spared.

“Violence has become entrenched” in the psyche of South Africa, Mathews said.

“How do we break that cycle?” she asked.

In 2014, she embarked on a research project to uncover the real extent of those child deaths. She did it by getting forensic pathologists to put the dead bodies of hundreds of newborn babies, infants, toddlers and teenagers on examination tables to determine exactly how they died.

Child death reviews are common in developed countries but had never been done in South Africa before Mathews’ project. As she feared, the findings were grim. 

Over a year, the pathologists examined the corpses of 711 children at two mortuaries in Cape Town and Durban and concluded that more than 15% of them died as a result of homicides. For context, Britain’s official child death review last year found 1% of its child deaths were homicides. Mathews’ research showed homicide was the second most common cause of death for children in those two precincts.

“And the numbers are not going down,” she said. “If anything, they are going up.”

There are two patterns in South Africa. Teenagers are being swallowed up in the country’s desperately high rate of violent street crime. But also, large numbers of young children aged 5 and under are victims of deadly violence meted out not by an offender with a gun or a knife on a street corner, but by mothers and fathers, relatives and friends, in kitchens and living rooms, around dinner tables and in front of TVs.

Fatal child abuse is where the justice system often fails and cases are “falling through the cracks,” Mathews said.

There was, she says, the case of a 9-month-old child who had seizures after being dropped off at day care. Though rushed to the hospital, the child died. 

Doctors found severe head injuries and told the mother to go to the police, but no one followed up. The mother never reported the death. When investigators tried to revive the case nearly two years later, the baby had long been buried and the evidence was cold.

Joan van Niekerk, a child protection expert, recounts numerous cases tainted by police ineptitude and corruption.

“I sometimes go through stages when I am more angry with the system than I am with the perpetrators and that’s not good,” she said. She said justice for children in South Africa is unacceptably “hard to achieve.”

And failures of justice sometimes lead to more deaths.

The neighbor originally charged with killing Wandi Zitho was released and the case provisionally dropped because the police didn’t deliver enough evidence, possibly because of a backlog in analyzing forensic evidence, according to one policeman working the case. Months later, the woman was arrested again and charged with murdering two other children.

Then there was the case of Tazne van Wyk.

Tazne was 8 when her body was found in February dumped in a drain near a highway nearly two weeks after she disappeared. She had been abducted, raped and murdered, police said.

Tazne’s parents blame the correctional system for paroling the man charged with their daughter’s murder despite a history of violent offenses against children. He’d already violated his parole once. They also fault police for failing to act on a tip that might have saved Tazne in the hours after her disappearance. 

The case was high profile. The Minister of Police spoke at Tazne’s funeral and admitted errors. “We have failed this child,” he conceded, pointing at Tazne’s small white coffin, trimmed in gold. South African President Cyril Ramaphosa visited the van Wyk home and promised meaningful action. 

Nine months later, Tazne’s parents feel it was all lip service.

“How many children after Tazne have already passed away? Have been kidnapped? Have been murdered? Still nothing is happening,” said her mother, Carmen van Wyk.

She sheds no tears. Instead, anger bubbles inside her and her community. Houses connected with the suspect and members of his family were set on fire in the wake of Tazne’s killing.

It’s not just on the police to stop the abuse, said Marc Hardwick, who was a policeman for 15 years, 10 of them as a detective in a child protection unit.

He recalls one case, from 20 years ago. A 6-year-old girl was beaten to death by her father because she was watching cartoons and, distracted as any 6-year-old would be, wasn’t listening to him.

When they arrested the father and took him away — he was later sentenced to life in prison — the victim’s 9-year-old cousin approached Hardwick and said: “I think you stopped my bad dreams today.” 

Clearly, children in that household had been living a nightmare, and the other adults had remained silent, said Hardwick: “The reality is that child abuse is not a topic people want to talk about.” 

Source: In South Africa, child homicides show violence ‘entrenched’

Zimbabwe: Mwenezi girl (6) killed in suspected ritual murder

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Allegedly, another case of ritual murder in Zimbabwe. A 6-year-old girl brutally murdered in Mwenezi, for apparent superstitious reasons. Zimbabwe has not yet recovered from one of its most notorious ritual murder cases in its recent history – the murder of 7-year-old Tapiwa Makore, in Murehwa village, in September 2020, extensively covered on this site – and of the cruel murder of a juvenile in Gokomere, Masvingo last month.

It is difficult to say whether there is in increase in ritualistic activities and murders in Zimbabwe or – also a likely explanation – there is an increased attention of local and regional authorities as well as the press – for this type of crimes and to report actual or suspected incidents. 
(Webmaster FVDK)

Mwenezi girl (6) killed in suspected ritual murder

Published: January 2, 2021
By: ZBC News, Zimbabwe – Justin Mahlahla 

In a yet another case of ritual murder, two men from Mwenezi allegedly murdered a six-year-old girl and burnt her body after removing her private parts.

This comes after the dust has hardly settled following the murder of a 7-year-old Murehwa boy, Tapiwa Makore, which was followed by another gruesome murder of a juvenile in Gokomere, Masvingo last month, yet another murder case of a minor has been recorded in Mwenezi.

The suspects, Taruziva Sithole (37) and Shackmore Dube (26), have since appeared in court to answer to murder charges following an incident which happened on the 29th of December, 2020.

The deceased, Irene Sithole, allegedly died after being assaulted by her uncle, Taruziva Sithole, who is said to have carried the body to a nearby bush where Shackmore Dube allegedly cut off the deceased’s private parts.

The two accused allegedly burnt the deceased’s body using firewood and were arrested after villagers reported the matter to Mwenezi police.

Police officers found the deceased’s burnt skull, teeth and ribs at the crime scene.

The two accused persons were remanded in custody to the 14th of January 2021.

Source: Mwenezi girl (6) killed in suspected ritual murder