Tales of sorcery

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Re: Tales of sorcery

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CEOCambodiaNews wrote:Villager Accused of Black Magic Shot Dead

by Buth Kimsay | July 6, 2016 | អានជាភាសាខ្មែរ

A man accused of using black magic to sicken people in his village was fatally shot five times inside his home in Pursat province in what police described as a revenge killing.

An attacker approached the home in Kandieng district’s Anlong Vil commune at about 8:30 on Monday night and shot Chhem Yin, 34, with an AK-47 assault rifle, striking him in the chest, leg and shoulder, commune police chief Srey Chhumneth said on Tuesday.

“Our police are searching to arrest the murderer who escaped from the scene,” Mr. Chhumneth said.

Prek Takong village residents had made four previous attempts to kill Chhem Yin after accusing him of sickening villagers with his sorcery, and had filed complaints with police in 2014, Mr. Chhumneth said.

“This murder is revenge because villagers believed he was a sorcerer,” he said.

In rural Cambodia, there is a widespread belief in black magic, and those suspected of using it for ill intentions often face violence.

full-story....https://www.cambodiadaily.com/news/vill ... ad-115058/
This was the fifth attempt to kill him:
A group of killers gunned down a man they believed to be a witch doctor having failed on four previous occasions to murder him.

Chhem Yin was killed by his fellow Cambodian villagers because they were convinced he was spreading illness through their community with black magic.

They thought the 34-year-old's father had taught him sorcery, so shot him dead with an AK-47 assault rifle in their fifth assassination attempt in the Pursat province on Monday.
Local police described the attack as a revenge killing, and told The Cambodia Daily villagers had filed complaints that the man had used sorcery to make people ill.

Keo Sokunthea, the local deputy provincial police chief, said: 'He was not a bad guy, but most people in the village did not like him because they believed he was taught black magic by his father.
'I have heard unidentified suspects attempted to kill the victim previously, but no one knows who they were.'
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... bodia.html
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Re: Tales of sorcery

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CEOCambodiaNews wrote:This was the fifth attempt to kill him:
Obviously he was a very powerful sorcerer. :evil:
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Re: Tales of sorcery

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Latest Sorcery Accusation Forces Another Man From Home
April 18, 2017

For the second time in a month, a man has been forced from his home in Kompong Speu province’s Kong Pisei district after being accused by fellow villagers of using black magic, prompting the district governor to promise to do more to address the issue.

An angry mob of about 150 villagers surrounded the home of Nil Sokha, 45, in Maha Russei commune on Saturday night. Some brandished machetes and wooden stakes, and others threw rocks at the windows and walls, commune and district officials said.

“Villagers accused him of being a sorcerer because fortune-tellers told the sick people in the village they were affected by black magic,” said commune chief Svay Choeung, who alerted district police after the mob began to gather.

This is the third time in the district over the past year that an alleged sorcerer has either been forced out of his home or was killed due to accusations of black magic.

Prak Kong was forced to flee at the end of last month after a mob of 600 villagers­—many armed with machetes, sticks and rocks—surrounded his home about 3 km from Mr. Sokha’s house in a neighboring commune and demanded he leave the village.
And in May, a 79-year-old Kong Pisei man suspected of sorcery was fatally stabbed in the stomach...

https://www.cambodiadaily.com/news/late ... me-128117/
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Re: Tales of sorcery

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He's a witch! Poor guy was probably crazy from his rice wine.
November 3, 2017
Three held for killing ‘sorcerer’ in Kratie
Police in Kratie province have arrested three people who murdered a man they believed was a sorcerer.

Chetr Borei district police chief Pav Kimhort said the suspects killed the man on Sunday and threw his body into a creek.

He said they believed the victim, Biv Nil, 48, had been making villagers sick.

Locals found the man’s body on Monday and informed police, who apprehended the trio later that day.

“The suspects said they were riding a motorbike when the victim stopped them and invited them to drink wine with him. They refused and the victim told them that he would ‘make them die’ if they did not stop,” Mr Kimhort said.

The suspects drove away, but the victim followed them.

One of the suspects then jumped off their motorbike and began beating the victim. The other two joined in, using a wooden stick to hit him on the head.

“They took the victim’s body and threw it into the creek nearby,” Mr Kimhort said.

He added the three men have been preliminarily charged with murder and appeared at the provincial court yesterday.
http://www.khmertimeskh.com/5088924/thr ... er-kratie/
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Re: Tales of sorcery

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Long read.
Hunting Sorcerers in Cambodia
Written on 19 October 2020. Posted in Article, Focus.

Author: Ivan Franceschini
Made in China: Spectral Revolutions May–August 2020

In January 2014, I had been in Cambodia for only a few weeks when a headline in a local newspaper attracted my attention: ‘Mob Decapitates 55-year-old Accused of Sorcery’ (Eang 2014). It was a fairly short article that recounted how, a couple of days earlier, a traditional healer called Khieu Porn had been hacked to death in the middle of the night, while on his way back home from the celebrations for the rice harvest festival in his village.
According to the reporter, the man had been stabbed no less than 10 times and then beheaded, his head thrown far away from the body. Apparently, his fellow villagers suspected him of being a sorcerer (thmup) and had decided to take matters into their own hands.

Trapaing Chuk was an anonymous hamlet in Kompong Speu province, not too far from Phnom Penh. It was a little cluster of wooden houses dispersed amid the same dusty roads, palm trees, rice fields, and wooden houses with which I would become familiar in the following years, but being my first foray in the Cambodian countryside, everything was brimming with promise.

When we arrived, the funeral of the victim had just ended and the whole family was assembled. Khieu’s son took it upon himself to accompany us to the scene of the crime. There, in a quiet clearing hidden by some trees, he pointed at a long stretch of grass muddied by a dark-brown stain of dried blood, a stark contrast with the surrounding greenery. Bending down, he picked up a couple of white fragments that lay hidden among the stalks and casually handed them to me—they were a tooth and a fragment of the skull of his father. In this way I found another part of the story that had gone unreported: not only had the man been beheaded, but the head had also been split in two parts, one of which had not been retrieved yet.

On that day, I managed to talk to a few more villagers. Most of my interviewees agreed that Khieu had been a practitioner of black magic and were happy that he had been killed. Lorng Youm, an elderly woman with gums stained by betel, had no doubt that the man had been a sorcerer who had caused the sudden death of many people in the village: ‘A man died the day after he had read his hand, another one soon after meeting him.’

Despite people’s hopes, the murder had not done much to rid the villagers of their problem. Quite the opposite—now they had to reckon with the ghost (khmauch) of the dead sorcerer, who was roaming the village at night looking for his missing head. People were terrified to go out after dark and monks had been called to place protective spells around some houses, but the effectiveness of such measures remained to be seen.
https://madeinchinajournal.com/2020/10/ ... -cambodia/
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Re: Tales of sorcery

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Malady and Magic: The Murders of Cambodia’s ‘Black Magic’ Practitioners

Andrew Haffner and Mech Dara
| Tue Feb 15, 2022 11:43 am

As the sun sets above the isolated village of Sre Ken, set in the rugged Oral district of Kampong Speu, the mountains that rise above on all sides fade to a soft purple before disappearing in the night.

It was on a dim evening here that Pleng Komsot, whose family says is about 18 years old, is alleged to have murdered his stepfather, Srey Vath. A provincial deputy police chief confirmed Komsot was arrested two days after the January 10 killing. The young man now stands accused of premeditated murder after he confessed to hacking at Vath with a knife until his stepfather died, collapsing in the dirt outside a neighboring home. To explain why he’d done such a thing, Komsot accused Vath of being a sorcerer, of using black magic to harm others.

On a recent visit to Sre Ken, reporters from VOD found that many other residents had also believed Vath to be a sorcerer.

Even if they felt it, none who spoke with reporters expressed any sympathy for the dead man — not even a former drinking partner, who said he had experienced serious stomach pains that he claimed were due to the effects of one of Vath’s curses. Even after the murder, the villager said his one-time friend still came to see him.

“When I sleep, I dream about his spirit,” he said, declining to give his name when asked. “It comes to suppress me.”

Accusations of witchcraft can be taken very seriously in parts of Cambodia. That’s especially so within rural hamlets such as Sre Ken, ringed by mountains and reachable only by a deeply rutted dirt road, crossed at various points by streams.

In places like this, killings related to sorcery claims are not uncommon. But this year may already be shaping up as an especially violent one, particularly with the brutal slaying on February 1 of five members of a Mondulkiri family of indigenous Bunong, including two 5-year-old children and a teenager, whose killers claimed to believe were sorcerers. That attack also left a 12-year-old boy seriously injured.

While the authors of a 2019 report from the U.N. OHCHR on so-called “popular justice” found no official statistics on witchcraft-related violence, they did learn of 49 cases of such that happened between 2012 and 2018. As described by local police and provincial court authorities, 35 of these events involved killings, while the rest were either attempted killings or harassment. The report says that in the period between January 2017 and June 2019, the Ministry of Interior noted 16 cases of mob violence and eight killings following accusations of witchcraft.
Full article: https://vodenglish.news/malady-and-magi ... titioners/
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Re: Tales of sorcery

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..."In places like this, killings related to sorcery claims are not uncommon. But this year may already be shaping up as an especially violent one, particularly with the brutal slaying on February 1 of five members of a Mondulkiri family of indigenous Bunong,"

An old folk-story, which will be hard for westerns to understand, having better focus then justice: Wisdom
The story of Bhikkhu Sok

Many year ago, there was a great famine in Kampuchea. A Phnong man called Chow Phnong Gruu came down from his mountain village to the town Senmonorom to try to find food for his family. When he returned home some time later, the superstitious villagers were afraid of him because he had dared to leave their secluded village and live boldly among the lowland strangers.

During the next few weeks, Chow Phnong Gruu began to show his family some of the new things that he had learned about cooking and preserving food. These new ways greatly disturbed the simple-living Phnongs. They began to whisper to each other that Chow was practicing evil magic.

Then one day, a neighbor's small child became ill and died. The villagers blamed Chow Phnong Kruu's magic for the child's death and demanded that the chief of the Phnongs punish him. Now, the chief of the Phnongs had forbidden his people to practice blach magic. He was furious when he heard that Chow had disobeyed his orders. So the Phnong chief immediatley sent for a group of hunters from the village and ordered them to kill Chow Phnong Kruu and all of his family with seven sharp razors....
Last edited by Samana Johann on Fri Feb 18, 2022 7:14 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Tales of sorcery

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CEOCambodiaNews wrote: Wed Feb 16, 2022 10:30 pm Malady and Magic: The Murders of Cambodia’s ‘Black Magic’ Practitioners

Andrew Haffner and Mech Dara
| Tue Feb 15, 2022 11:43 am

As the sun sets above the isolated village of Sre Ken, set in the rugged Oral district of Kampong Speu, the mountains that rise above on all sides fade to a soft purple before disappearing in the night.

It was on a dim evening here that Pleng Komsot, whose family says is about 18 years old, is alleged to have murdered his stepfather, Srey Vath. A provincial deputy police chief confirmed Komsot was arrested two days after the January 10 killing. The young man now stands accused of premeditated murder after he confessed to hacking at Vath with a knife until his stepfather died, collapsing in the dirt outside a neighboring home. To explain why he’d done such a thing, Komsot accused Vath of being a sorcerer, of using black magic to harm others.

On a recent visit to Sre Ken, reporters from VOD found that many other residents had also believed Vath to be a sorcerer...

The related article.
What was not told about the Orals event is that it actually happened in the middle of the village fest, next to many people and that it's actually a seldom peaceful community where countries usual violence between even young boys is merely unknown.
Btw. January is known as the time of non-humans, refers to "Rauhnächte" in central Europe. Villagers didn't went out for two week, afraid of ghosts as the dogs barked steady into the 'empty'.
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Re: Tales of sorcery

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One Village, One Week, Two Murders: Sorcery, Mental Health Issues Raised
6 min read
Mech Dara
| Thu Apr 21, 2022 6:10 pm

Two separate alleged murders happened within three days amid the New Year holiday in Siem Reap’s Prasat Trav village, involving a sorcerer killing and a domestic attack by a man said to have mental illness.

Two men, Pov Pao, 24, and a 15-year-old, were charged Monday night after Koy Chhoeung, 51, died from injuries he sustained from an alleged attack by the two on the night of April 15.

Siem Reap investigating judge Nou Veasna charged both men with violence with aggravating circumstances, with punishment of up to five years in jail and 10 million riels ($2,500) in fines.

Kok Doung commune chief Kem Ham said the two men, who are brothers in law, were neighbors of the victim, who Ham described as a kind man who worked small jobs like picking cassava and cleaning and skinning ducks and chickens for eating.

Ham said the men thought Chhoeung was a sorcerer, and they beat him with their hands and knees until Chhoeung was unconscious. Chhoeung was injured in his gallbladder and liver, and died two days after the attack. Killings over accusations of sorcery are not uncommon in rural Cambodia.

“It was a groundless accusation,” Ham said of claims that Chhoeung was a sorcerer. “They came to attack him while he was doing his work. There is no evidence that he does black magic or incantations or other things related to sorcery, but in fact he was just a normal person. How could they have accused him of being a witch or sorcerer?”
Article: https://vodenglish.news/one-village-one ... ed-raised/
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