WABAG – Repeated acts of brutal violence in Papua New Guinea’s highlands provinces are being put down to the spreading of superstitious beliefs.

Sorcery beliefs, and particularly the abuse of those beliefs, have long been the justification used for murder and torture in remote areas, but police now say it is spreading to other regions.

On Monday, a mother was hacked to death with an axe in Enga province, and police are trying to raise funds to charter a plane so they can investigate.

Misila, a mother of four, was accused in January, along with two other women, of causing a measles epidemic.

A Lutheran missionary who has worked in the area for several years, Anton Lutz, and police, had earlier visited the village to discourage the practice of accusing women of harbouring sanguma, or evil spirits.

Lutz says many people are willing to change their ways, but not all.

“This woman, she’s been accused over years of causing children to die of measles, and causing old men to die of pneumonia and causing people to die of malaria and they’ve been blaming her for this for a long time .

“And so she’s been trying to survive and raise her children – but on Monday they walked up the hill and didn’t give her any chance to explain herself and they just killed her.”

Lutz says one of the other women also accused of sorcery was caught and imprisoned in a house, but she managed to escape and is now running for her life.

Lutz says women in remote villages like Fiyawena and Wanakipa live in constant fear of being accused of sorcery.

According to local beliefs, the sanguma only reside in the women and sometimes in young children.

The Provincial Police Commander for Enga Province, George Kakas, says belief in sorcery is not diminishing but in fact spreading quickly.

“The practice of witchcraft and sorcery is coming out of the province now, it’s spreading now – it’s spreading like wildfire into places where there was never any practice of sorcery before.

“Just the movement of people, moving around to other areas with their beliefs and starting to believe what other people believe.”

Kakas says he has received an official complaint regarding the sorcery-related killing of the woman known as Misila and is now writing to local MPs to ask for the money needed to charter and to fly a plane to Fiyawena village to investigate the complaint.

Kakas says it will cost almost US$1500 to charter the plane. for the a two-hour flight from Wabag town – and then there is a two-hour walk from the airstrip to the village.

A volunteer who works supporting victims of sorcery -related violence, Mary Kini, says the difficulty of access to remote highland areas remains a major barrier to stopping such attacks.

She too is a survivor, after witnessing as a child her stepfather being hacked to death. Kini says her job is also to repatriate the accused women, as it’s not safe to go back to their own village once they have been suspected of being possessed by the sanguma.

“We help this group of women to get on with their livelihoods, like we repatriate them to other provinces and they never go back to their original residences. We repatriate them to other locations, wherever they feel free to stay.”

After last Monday’s killing in Enga, the national parliamentary opposition leader, Don Polye, who is from the province, demanded the government bring in tougher penalties.

But the police say they simply need more resources.

Police say villagers are alert to the sounds of an approaching aircraft carrying police investigators and perpetrators escape into surrounding jungle.

In a separate incident, two women were reportedly “chopped to death” in a sorcery-related killing spree in Gembogl, Chimbu, last Thursday, police say.

Acting provincial police commander Chief Superintendent Albert Beli confirmed that they were looking for a Grade 10 student at Mt Wilhelm Secondary School to be questioned over the killings.

The mutilated body of the first woman was thrown into her home before it was set on fire. The second woman was taken to hospital but was pronounced dead on arrival.

Beli said the student’s father passed away recently after a short illness. He said the son accused the two women of practising sorcery. Police are questioning others implicated in the killing.

Beli is appealing to the student, who has gone into hiding, to turn himself in to police.

He called on people who know of his whereabouts to notify police. He said it was an offence to harbour crime suspects.