© marcovarro/ShutterstockA group of children and adults get ready for the skeleton dance at Goroka Tribal Festival in Goroka, Papua New Guinea, on September 16, 2011.
Papua New Guinea - a large island nation north of Australia - boasts a fast-growing economy and a rich natural resource base of gold, copper, oil and agricultural products. But deep within the British Commonwealth country's rugged mountains and tropical rain forests, some dark practices still occur.
On Wednesday (Oct. 9), the father of a three-year-old girl allegedly took his daughter into a wooded area and bit into her neck, eating the flesh and sucking her blood, the
Papua New Guinea Post-Courier reports. Two boys witnessed the event and reported it to local officials, who quickly arrested the man.
"He was just laughing at the boys and continued eating the flesh and sucking the blood," local councilor John Kenny told the
Post-Courier. As gruesome as the incident was, it's not an isolated event, according to numerous reports from Papua New Guinea (PNG). The relatively unexplored country is home to millions of people who live in isolated rural villages and maintain traditional practices that, by many reports, sometimes include cannibalism.
Last year, PNG officials arrested 29 people for killing and cannibalizing the brains and genitals of seven people accused of sorcery. In February, the family of a 6-year-old boy who had recently died accused a 20-year-old mother of
witchcraft.
The woman was stripped, bound, tortured with a hot iron, doused with gasoline and burned to death on a pile of trash in broad daylight in front of hundreds of onlookers,
The Associated Press reported. Officials condemned the brutal killing, but made no arrests.
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