Panama police find seven dead in suspected exorcism

Seven people were killed in a bizarre religious ritual in a jungle community in Panama in which indigenous residents were rounded up by about ten lay preachers and tortured, beaten, burned and hacked with machetes to make them “repent their sins”.

Police freed 14 members of the Ngabe Bugle indigenous group who had been tied up andbeatenwithwoodencudgels 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, Mr Baloyes said, but 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,” he said. “In that ritual, there were people being held against their will, being mistreated.

“All of these rites were aimed at killing them if they did not repent their sins.”

Mr Baloyes said “there was a naked person, a woman,” inside the building where investigators found machetes, knives and a ritually sacrificed goat.

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

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

“They searched this family out to hold a ritual and they massacred them, mistreated them, killed practically the whole family,” Mr Baloyes said, adding that one of the suspects in the killing was 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 known as a Comarca, called the sect “satanic” and said 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 co-existence in the Holy Scriptures,” Mr Miranda said.

The sect was said to be relatively new to the area and had been operating locally only for about three months.

Things reportedly came to a head Saturday when one of the church members had a vision.