Guwahati: A villager was lynched after he had been suspected of indulging in sorcery in a remote Adivasi-inhabited Kalabasi hamlet of Narayanpur Tea Estate in South Assam’s Lakhipur sub-division by fellow villagers.
Police said the body of the lynched villager, Jawaharlal Mura was buried near the village temple by the mob of people after the murder on Thursday afternoon.
A team of policemen rushed to the village early Friday morning to exhume the body and arrested eleven of the villagers including three women.
The slain adivasi villager was suspected by fellow villagers to have let loose a bad spirit in the village causing serious illness to many of the villagers.
Police informed that a mob dragged Mura from his house at around noon on Thursday and tied him to a tree beside the temple in the village after a villager called Sukumar Mura told villagers that the Mother Goddess had come to him in dream the previous night and told him that many villagers had been sick because she was not accepting worship because of the presence of evil Jawaharlal Mura in the village.
He was then lynched and buried by the villagers.
On Friday morning, the police team was resisted by villagers from digging up Mura’s body.
Police resorted to lathicharge to control the angry villagers and arrested 11 of them.
All of them have been slapped with murder charge.
It is a case of witch hunting which often occurs in remote tribal and Adivasi dominated villages sans any healthcare facilities in the State.
A large number of people in Kalabasti hamlet recently have been affected by malaria and diarrhea which commonly occur around this time of the year.
But the illiterate villagers thought it was due to presence of some evil spirit in the village that caused the illness.
