Five women were killed by locals at Kanjiya Maraitoli village under Mandar police station, 30km from here, on the outskirts of the state capital in the intervening night of Friday and Saturday for allegedly practising witchcraft. Jharkhand witnesses frequent killings in the name of witchcraft.

Police sources said locals broke into a few houses around midnight when the women were asleep. They dragged out the five women they suspected to be playing black magic on their children. The assailants, which also reportedly included local women, took them away from their houses and killed them.

Five women killed on suspicion of practising witchcraft:

The village is situated in a Maoist-hit area and witnesses no presence of police at night. It gave the assailants a free time to kill the women. No villager could gather the courage to oppose the assailants, armed with traditional weapons, numbering around 100, a villager said. The police reached the village on Saturday morning and recovered the bodies. DIG Singh said police have detained many villagers to interrogate them.

Jharkhand accounted for 54 out of 160 cases of murders where women were branded witches and killed in 2013 and a total of 400 women have been murdered with the same motive since 2001 in the state.According to an estimate over 1000 women have been killed in the last one decade in the state for allegedly practising witchcraft.

The National Crime Records Bureau has estimated 2,097 such murders between 2000 and 2012 in the country.