Mother uses trident in ritual killing

Freakish things and people are plentiful--all over the world.

From AFP
June 10, 2004
AN Indian villager speared her nine-year-old son to death with a trident in a suspected black magic ritual seeking to ease her impoverished family's troubles, police said Wednesday.

Bidyulata Swain, 40, repeatedly stabbed her son Satyanarayan when her husband and elder son were away from home Tuesday in Jarakapada in the eastern state of Orissa, police said.

"It looks like a case of mistaken belief in black magic, that she believed the death of her son might change a bad patch for the family," said D.K. Das, a police official in the town 230km north of Orissa's capital Bhubaneswar.

He said Swain's husband was in poor health and in financial ruin after he had closed his small construction workshop.

Swain killed her child with a trident known as a trishul, the weapon of the Hindu god of destruction Shiva.

Human sacrifices are reported periodically in rural India where many people put faith in the occult.