6 Children and a pregnant woman found dead, killed by tradition

Incident

The remains of six children and a pregnant woman discovered in a burial pit in Panama, where a religious sect located torturing indigenous people.

The pregnant mother buried with five of her children – aged from one to 17 – after they murdered in a bizarre exorcism ritual in a remote jungle community near the country’s Caribbean coast.

Police tell indigenous residents rounded up by nearly ten lay preachers and tortured, beaten and hacked with machetes to make them ‘repent their sins,’ authorities said Thursday.

Yesterday officers detained ten members of an evangelical sect known as The New Light of God. They also released 14 members of the Ngabe Bugle indigenous group who had been tied up and beaten with wooden cudgels and Bibles.

The Ngabe Bugle is Panama’s largest indigenous group and experiences from high rates of poverty and illiteracy.

Prosecutor Described The Scene

Local prosecutor Rafael Baloyes explained about a chilling scene discovered by inspectors when they forced their way through the jungle-clad hills to the Ngabe Bugle indigenous community near the Caribbean coast Tuesday.

Informed by three villagers who fled and made their way to a local hospital for treatment earlier, police made for something terrible, Baloyes told.

But they still were shaken by what they encountered at a church, in a ranch where a little-known religious sect is known as ‘The New Light of God’ was operating.

‘They were doing a ritual inside the structure. In that ritual, people were being held against their will, mistreated,’ Baloyes stated.

‘All of these rites pointed at killing them if they did not repent their sins,’ he replied.

About a mile away from the church building, officials found a freshly dug grave with the bodies of six kids and one adult. The dead involved five kids as young as a year old, their pregnant mother, and a 17-year-old female bystander.

All the sufferers, and all the suspects, were members of the same indigenous community.

Other Statements

Ricardo Miranda, head of the Ngabe Bugle semi-autonomous zone known as a Comarca, described the sect ‘satanic’ and told it went against the region’s Christian beliefs.

‘We need the quick eradication of this Satanic sect, which disrupts all the practices of spirituality and co-existence in the Holy Scriptures,’ Miranda told.