Seven people were killed in a bizarre religious ritual in a Panamanian jungle community, where indigenous residents were rounded up by about 10 lay preachers and tortured, beaten, burned and hacked with machetes to make them “repent their sins,” authorities said on Thursday.
Police freed 14 members of the Ngabe Bugle indigenous group who had been tied up and beaten with wooden cudgels and Bibles.
Local prosecutor Rafael Baloyes described a chilling scene found by investigators when they made their way through the jungle to the remote Ngabe Bugle indigenous community near the Caribbean coast on Tuesday.
Alerted by three villagers who escaped and made their way to a local hospital for treatment earlier, police were prepared for something bad, Baloyes said, but added that they were still surprised by what they discovered at an improvised “church” at a ranch where a little-known religious sect known as “The New Light of God” was operating.
“They were performing a ritual inside the structure. In that ritual, there were people being held against their will, being mistreated,” Baloyes said.
“All of these rites were aimed at killing them if they did not repent their sins,” he said.
“There was a naked person, a woman,” inside the building, where investigators found machetes, knives and a ritually sacrificed goat, he added.
The rites had been going on since Saturday last week and had already resulted in deaths, Baloyes said.
About a 2km away from the building, authorities found a freshly dug grave with the corpses five children as young as one, their pregnant mother and a 17-year-old female neighbor.
“They searched this family out to hold a ritual and they massacred them, mistreated them, killed practically the whole family,” Baloyes said, adding that one of the suspects in the killing is the grandfather of the children who were slain.
All the victims, and apparently all the suspects, were members of the same indigenous community.
Ricardo Miranda, leader of the Ngabe Bugle semi-autonomous zone, called the sect “satanic” and said that it went against the region’s Christian beliefs.
“We demand the immediate eradication of this Satanic sect, which violates all the practices of spirituality and coexistence in the holy scriptures,” Miranda said.
The area is so remote that helicopters had to be used to ferry the injured out to hospitals for treatment.
‘IN A DIFFERENT PLACE’: The envoy first visited Shanghai, where he attended a Chinese basketball playoff match, and is to meet top officials in Beijing tomorrow US Secretary of State Antony Blinken yesterday arrived in China on his second visit in a year as the US ramps up pressure on its rival over its support for Russia while also seeking to manage tensions with Beijing. The US diplomat tomorrow is to meet China’s top brass in Beijing, where he is also expected to plead for restraint as Taiwan inaugurates president-elect William Lai (賴清德), and to raise US concerns on Chinese trade practices. However, Blinken is also seeking to stabilize ties, with tensions between the world’s two largest economies easing since his previous visit in June last year. At the
UNSETTLING IMAGES: The scene took place in front of TV crews covering the Trump trial, with a CNN anchor calling it an ‘emotional and unbelievably disturbing moment’ A man who doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire outside the courthouse where former US president Donald Trump is on trial has died, police said yesterday. The New York City Police Department (NYPD) said the man was declared dead by staff at an area hospital. The man was in Collect Pond Park at about 1:30pm on Friday when he took out pamphlets espousing conspiracy theories, tossed them around, then doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire, officials and witnesses said. A large number of police officers were nearby when it happened. Some officers and bystanders rushed
Beijing is continuing to commit genocide and crimes against humanity against Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in its western Xinjiang province, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a report published on Monday, ahead of his planned visit to China this week. The State Department’s annual human rights report, which documents abuses recorded all over the world during the previous calendar year, repeated language from previous years on the treatment of Muslims in Xinjiang, but the publication raises the issue ahead of delicate talks, including on the war in Ukraine and global trade, between the top U.S. diplomat and Chinese
RIVER TRAGEDY: Local fishers and residents helped rescue people after the vessel capsized, while motorbike taxis evacuated some of the injured At least 58 people going to a funeral died after their overloaded river boat capsized in the Central African Republic’s (CAR) capital, Bangui, the head of civil protection said on Saturday. “We were able to extract 58 lifeless bodies,” Thomas Djimasse told Radio Guira. “We don’t know the total number of people who are underwater. According to witnesses and videos on social media, the wooden boat was carrying more than 300 people — some standing and others perched on wooden structures — when it sank on the Mpoko River on Friday. The vessel was heading to the funeral of a village chief in