BLOODY HOAN

Penis theft panic hits city..

By Joe Bavier

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.

Rumors 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.

(Editing by Nick Tattersall and Mary Gabriel)