GUWAHATI, India: A 63-year-old Indian woman has been dismembered and beheaded by machete-wielding villagers who accused her of practicing witchcraft, police said Tuesday.
Seven people have been arrested over the death of Moni Orang, a mother of five who was seized from her home in the northeastern state of Assam on Monday after local priests said she was casting spells.
“The attackers armed with machetes and other crude implements descended on the village and took away Moni Orang from her house and then brutally killed her,” senior police official Manabendra Dev Roy told AFP.
“She was decapitated and her limbs were chopped off.”
On Tuesday villagers stormed the local police station to protest against the arrests.
“Moni was a witch and had cast evil spells on her enemies,” said villager Kiran Teronpi on local television.
“There is no place for such sorcerers and so her killing is justified.”
The victim’s husband R. Orang said his wife was “an innocent woman” and accused the priests of stoking “suspicion and provocation.”
Belief in witchcraft and the occult remains widespread in some impoverished and tribal-dominated areas of India.
In some cases women are stripped naked as punishment, burnt alive or driven from their homes and killed.
Some states including Jharkhand have introduced special laws to try to curb crimes against people accused of witchcraft.
Villagers behead woman over ‘witchcraft’
Villagers behead woman over ‘witchcraft’
More than 9,000 flights canceled as major winter storm bears down across much of US
- “Dangerously cold temperatures and wind chills are spreading into the area and will remain in place into Monday,” the agency said on X
DALLAS: More than 9,000 flights across the US set to take off over the weekend have been canceled as a major storm expected to wreak havoc across much of the country threatens to knock out power for days and snarl major roadways.
Roughly 140 million people were under a winter storm warning from New Mexico to New England.
The National Weather Service forecast warns of widespread heavy snow and a band of catastrophic ice stretching from east Texas to North Carolina.
Forecasters say damage, especially in areas pounded by ice, could rival that of a hurricane.
Ice and sleet that hit northern Texas overnight were moving toward the central part of the state on Saturday, the National Weather Service in Fort Worth said.
“Dangerously cold temperatures and wind chills are spreading into the area and will remain in place into Monday,” the agency said on X.
Low temperatures will be mostly in the single digits for the next few nights, with wind chills as low as minus 24 Celsius.
About 68,000 power outages were reported across the country at 8 a.m. ET, about 27,600 of them in Texas. Snow and sleet continued to fall in Oklahoma.
After sweeping through the South, the storm was expected to move into the Northeast, dumping about a foot of snow from Washington through New York and Boston, the weather service predicted.
Temperatures reached minus 34 C just before dawn in rural Lewis County and other parts of upstate New York after days of heavy snow.
Governors in more than a dozen states sounded the alarm about the turbulent weather ahead, declaring emergencies or urging people to stay home.
