Heksejagt i England

Vi har i de seneste par uger haft lidt problemer med middelalderlige traditioner som blodhævn og blodpenge blandt vores eget mix af invandrere her i Danmark. I England er de imidlertid meget længere fremme - der har nogle indvandrergrupper genindført heksejagten:

'Witch' child cruelty trio guilty

Three people have been convicted over the torture of an eight-year-old girl they thought was a witch.

Ser De, troen på magi og hekseri er nemlig meget udbredt i Afrika, især hos negre i den sydlige ende af kontinentet. I en angolansk familie i London udviklede det sig som følger:

The cruelty started at the beginning of 2003 when a boy told his mother that the girl had been practising witchcraft.

It was an accusation the woman believed.

Jurors were told that the child was cut with a knife and beaten with a belt and shoe to "beat the devil out of her" during her ordeal at a flat in Hackney, east London.

During police interviews, the girl said Kisanga had cornered her in the kitchen and told her "today you die".

The court also heard the girl, now 10, was put into a laundry bag and believed she would be "thrown away" into a river.

Pigen fik også gnedet chilli-pulver i øjnene - BBC nævner ikke hvorfor, men en sandsynlig forklaring er at det skulle beskytte de tre forbrydere mod hendes "onde øjne".

Tidligere i Maj i år fangede en anden historie fra CNN min opmærksomhed. Tilbage i 2001 fandt det engelske politi liget af en 4-til-6-årig sort dreng der havde fået hovede, arme og ben hugget af i Themsen ved Tower Bridge. Ud over at barnet var blevet lemlæstet fandt et ligsyn frem til at der var tale om en del mere end bare et almindeligt barnemord:

Police investigating the murder suspect the boy was the victim of a ritual killing after being brought to Britain from Nigeria. .............

Tests suggest the boy, believed to have been between 4 and 6 years old and alive when he arrived in London, may have been poisoned.

Evidence found in Adam's lower intestine was identified as being the highly poisonous calabar bean, which police think may have been used to subdue him before his death.

Other contents in his stomach including crushed bone, and clay pellets impregnated with gold and quartz were discovered in his lower intestine

For at prøve at identificere barnet rettede politiet en forespørgsel til samtlige institutioner i London, om de kendte til nogen sorte drenge mellem 4 og 7 år gamle der var forsvundet i en tre-måneders periode mellem Juli og September i 2001. Svarene overraskede noget:

Detective Chief Inspector Will O'Reilly told BBC Radio: "We were really looking at black children, black male children, aged between 4 and 7. And we found 300 of those that couldn't be accounted for.

The children's so-called carers often told police that the youngsters had returned to Africa.

"When we had information that they had left the country, we asked through Interpol for police to make inquiries in the local countries to which they (were said to have) returned. In the majority of cases, we got no reply on that," O'Reilly said.

"It is a large figure, far more than we anticipated when we started this line of inquiry."

Police managed to trace only two of the 300 missing children.

Det stemmer til eftertanke.

Henrik