She's got another job these days, close to food.
Posted on 04/22/2008 8:23:11 PM PDT by LonghornFreeper
KINSHASA (Reuters) - Police in Congo have arrested 13 suspected sorcerers accused of using black magic to steal or shrink men's penises after a wave of panic and attempted lynchings triggered by the alleged witchcraft.
Reports of so-called penis snatching are not uncommon in West Africa, where belief in traditional religions and witchcraft remains widespread, and where ritual killings to obtain blood or body parts still occur.
Rumours of penis theft began circulating last week in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo's sprawling capital of some 8 million inhabitants. They quickly dominated radio call-in shows, with listeners advised to beware of fellow passengers in communal taxis wearing gold rings.
Purported victims, 14 of whom were also detained by police, claimed that sorcerers simply touched them to make their genitals shrink or disappear, in what some residents said was an attempt to extort cash with the promise of a cure.
"You just have to be accused of that, and people come after you. We've had a number of attempted lynchings. ... You see them covered in marks after being beaten," Kinshasa's police chief, Jean-Dieudonne Oleko, told Reuters on Tuesday.
Police arrested the accused sorcerers and their victims in an effort to avoid the sort of bloodshed seen in Ghana a decade ago, when 12 suspected penis snatchers were beaten to death by angry mobs. The 27 men have since been released.
"I'm tempted to say it's one huge joke," Oleko said.
"But when you try to tell the victims that their penises are still there, they tell you that it's become tiny or that they've become impotent. To that I tell them, 'How do you know if you haven't gone home and tried it'," he said.
Some Kinshasa residents accuse a separatist sect from nearby Bas-Congo province of being behind the witchcraft in revenge for a recent government crackdown on its members.
"It's real. Just yesterday here, there was a man who was a victim. We saw. What was left was tiny," said 29-year-old Alain Kalala, who sells phone credits near a Kinshasa police station.
(For full Reuters Africa coverage and to have your say on the top issues, visit: http://africa.reuters.com/ )
(Editing by Nick Tattersall and Mary Gabriel)
She's got another job these days, close to food.
"the Castanza Effect goes worldwide"
It had to happen
No mention of what they do with them when they get them........
And I used to think that people who collect stamps were weird.
Sometimes the jokes just write themselves.
LOL.
POsting pictures of Helen Thomas is now considered black magic?
POST THIRTY-EIGHT??!!! An article about shrinking penises and it takes THIRTY-EIGHT posts for the first Helen Thomas picture? Man, FR is off its game!
I think you mean laudly?
At least the “Plaster Casters” had the decency to return them when they were finished using them...
They sell them to transgender females, as the final step in their "transition".
Much easier on their systems than surgery, and no hospitalization or long painful recovery time before putting the new equipment to use.
Yeah, his is already tiny and shrunk. And bent.
My fault. Sowwy.
I’m going to start wearing a cup from now on.
When ya wear a cup, yer “protected”.
I cannot imagine what piece of driv .... er information could more perfectly and dynamically illustrate the worth and wonder of the World Wide Wait. I am SO grateful I have been appraised of this situation in the Congo. How utterly bereft I would be without it. Thank you thank you thank YOU!!!
LOL!!! That's funny.
Lemme tell you, stories like this make me glad that my ancestors were snatched away from that God-forsaken place and brought to America. There is nothing about the 'motherland' that appeals to me.
I would have blamed it on shrinkage rather than witchcraft penis theft.
Tell them about the shrinkage, Jerry!!!
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