State mental health officials had recommended that Clark be found not guilty by reason of insanity after he had a competency evaluation and said he thought witches were in his house. Read more here.
Long known to Nicaraguans as a center for supernatural activity, this small town—one of famousPueblos Blancos—is home to several dozen brujas and brujos, or witches and witchdoctors, who continue the esoteric practices of their ancestors. They claim they can predict the future and employ curative plants and volcanic rock for concoctions that promise to heal any ailment. Read more here.
A Saudi court sentenced two Asian housemaids to 10 years in jail and ordered their lashed 1,000 times each after they were found guilty of indulging in sorcery at their employers’ houses. Their Saudi employers reported the two maids to the Gulf country’s feared religious police, saying they had discovered that their families had been harmed because of sorcery practiced by the maids against them. Read more here.
Mother of Five children resident village Tajik killed by a so called peer during the vacation of Jin from her. Read more here.
Christopher Howse finds that a health leaflet mentions a belief that jinn can cause madness. Read more here.
Reverend Doctor Joe Ellison, Jr. became the Republican Party’s new director of African American engagement in Virginia, the pastor who defended Pat Robinson’s 2010 comments that voodoo caused the earthquakes in Haiti. Read more here.
Alex Kanneh, 44, first met the woman, known as Patient A, when she was an in-patient at the now defunct St Clements Hospital in Mile End, where he worked. Kanneh, of Ming Street, Poplar, sent the 33-year-old text messages declaring his love, the Nursing and Midwifery Council heard. When the affair came out in April 2011, Kanneh bombarded the woman with texts threatening to “put voodoo on her”. Read more here.
In Africa today, according to Igwe, witch hunting and the defamation and abuse of people accused of witchcraft is a major problem, and is undermining progress for much of sub-Saharan Africa. Read more here.
Chief Magistrate Court sitting in Lokoja, Kogi State, on Tuesday, remanded two Fulani herdsmen in prison custody for allegedly killing a housewife over allegation of witchcraft. Read more here.
There is no clear explanation for the apparent up-tick in killings in parts of the South Pacific nation, and even government officials seem at a loss to say why this is happening. Some are arguing the recent violence is fuelled not by the nation’s widespread belief in black magic but instead by economic jealousy born of a mining boom that has widened the country’s economic divide and pitted the haves against the have-nots. Read more here.
