An couple and four of their children were hacked to death by a mob of villagers, who accused them of practising witchcraft and making their children sick, police in the eastern state of Odisha said on Monday.
The victims were asleep in their mud house in the hamlet of Lahanda in Keonjhar district, when a group of around five people armed with axes broke in.
The suspects, believed to be relatives of the family, accused the victims of being behind for a spate of frequent illnesses among infants in the village, said police.
District Superintendent of Police Kavita Jalan said two surviving children alerted authorities.
The police reached the village in the early hours of Monday to find the mutilated bodies in pools of blood, an axe abandoned inside the hut, and a young boy still alive.
“The eight-year-old boy was found by police gasping between the dead bodies,” Jalan said, adding that a search was being conducted to find the suspects, who had fled the village after the incident.
The practice of branding men and women as witches and assaulting or killing them remains common is some parts of India, particularly among tribal communities, despite there being a law against it.
There were 160 cases of murders linked to witch hunts in 2013, and 119 in 2012, data from the National Crime Records Bureau shows.
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