A 63-year-old Dalit woman was brutally killed in Bihar’s Katihar district on the intervening night of Thursday and Friday for allegedly practising witchcraft.
Police had neither registered an FIR nor arrested anyone till the time of filing the report.
The victim Bugia Devi was sleeping in the kitchen of her house at Rajdhani Mahadalit Tola under Falka police station in the district at the time of the incident.
Her son Kailash discovered her lying dead on her cot on Friday morning when he woke up to give fodder to his cattle. Her body had several deep cuts and was drenched in blood.
Bugia’s daughter-in-law Poonam Devi accused a neighbour Manni Rishi of the murder.
“Manni’s father-in-law had died recently and he used to accuse my mother-in-law of having killed him through witchcraft. He used to torture her and often threatened to kill her,” Poonam told reporters.
Falka station house officer (SHO) Munna Kumar Patel visited the place of occurrence and sent the body for post-mortem.
Asked about FIR and arrests, the SHO told The Telegraph: “We have sent the body for post-mortem and are waiting for its report. We have not received any complaint from the family of the deceased so far; therefore no FIR has been registered. We will register it once we get a complaint and conduct our investigations. Nobody has been arrested till now.”
Bihar was the first state in the country to promulgate a law — Prevention of Witch (Daain) Practices Act — in 1999 to prevent witch-hunting, and torturing, humiliating and killing of women in its name.
