Ganske frygtelig historie IMHO.
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> Lynchings in Congo as penis theft panic hits capital
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> By Joe Bavier
> Reuters: Apr 22, 2008
>
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20080422/od_uk_nm/oukoe_uk_congo_democratic_witchcraft_1
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> 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.
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