Seven killed, 14 tortured in Panama exorcism ritual

PANAMA CITY: Seven people were killed in a bizarre ritual in a jungle community in Panama, in which 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.

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-clad hills 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 on Thursday, but were still surprised by what they discovered at an improvised “church” at a ranch where a littleknown religious sect known as “The New Light of God” was operating.

“They were performing a ritual. People were held against their will.

“All these rites were aimed at killing them if they did not repent. There was a naked woman inside the building, where investigators found machetes and a ritually sacrificed goat,” Baloyes said.

The rites had been going on since Saturday, and had already resulted in deaths, he said.

About 2km away from the church, authorities found a freshly dug grave with the corpses of six children and one adult. The dead included five children as young as a year old, their pregnant mother and a 17-year-old female neighbour.

“They searched this family out to hold a ritual and they massacred 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.