At least 26 people were reportedly killed by a gang in three remote villages in Papua New Guinea’s north, United Nations and police officials said.
Acting provincial police commander in the island nation’s East Sepik province, James Baugen, told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC): “It was a very terrible thing … when I approached the area, I saw that there were children, men, women. They were killed by a group of 30 young men.”
Mr Baugen told the ABC that all the houses in the villages had been burned and the remaining villagers were sheltering at a police station, too scared to name the perpetrators.
“Some of the bodies left in the night were taken by crocodiles into the swamp. We only saw the place where they were killed. There were heads chopped off,” Mr Baugen said, adding that the attackers were hiding and there were no arrests yet.
Chris Jensen, country director for aid group World Vision, said 26 people had been confirmed dead, eight were missing and 51 families were displaced from their homes in Angoram district on the crocodile-infested Sepik River, the longest river on New Guinea island.
“The trigger seems to be, as it is in most cases in PNG, a combination of a couple of things. But sorcery seems to be one of the triggers along with land ownership,” Jensen told the Associated Press.
“An individual will get accused of sorcery and they may be the people who perhaps have some control over some assets or land.”
UN commissioner for human rights Volker Turk said in a statement on Wednesday that the attacks happened last week.
“I am horrified by the shocking eruption of deadly violence in Papua New Guinea, seemingly as the result of a dispute over land and lake ownership and user rights,” he said.
Mr Turk said at least 26 people had reportedly died, including 16 children.
“This number could rise to over 50 as local authorities search for missing people. In addition, more than 200 villagers fled as their homes were torched,” he said.
East Sepik governor Allan Bird said violence across this diverse nation of more than 10 million people, who are mostly subsistence farmers, had escalated in the past decade. Police are under-resourced and rarely intervene, he added.
Papua New Guinea has more than 800 Indigenous languages and has been riven by tribal conflicts over land for centuries.
Most of the land belongs to tribes rather than individuals. With no clear borders, territorial disputes never end.
These conflicts have become increasingly lethal in recent decades as combatants move from bows and arrows to assault rifles, and mercenaries are increasingly becoming involved.
Blake Johnson, an analyst at the Australian Security Policy Institute think tank, said while the East Sepik killings appeared to be a “particularly gruesome event, it is not the first instance of mass murder this year” in Papua New Guinea.
“Escalation of violence between groups, often leading to retaliatory murder is, at best, culturally accepted and at worst encouraged,” he said.
Law enforcement officers lack the resources and training to police most of the country, he added.
“The country is took big, too harsh and too difficult to navigate, and we don’t even know how many people live in these places,” Mr Johnson said.
The tribal fighting attracted international attention in February when at least 26 combatants and an unconfirmed number of bystanders were killed in a gun battle in Enga province.
The conflicts complicated an emergency response in May when a landslide in the same province devastated at least one village. The government said more than 2,000 people were killed, while the UN estimated the death toll at 670.
Internal security problems in Papua New Guinea, the South Pacific’s most populous country after Australia, has become a battle line for China’s struggle against US allies for influence in the region.
Australia, Papua New Guinea’s former colonial master and its biggest provider of foreign aid, signed a bilateral security pact last year that targets its nearest neighbour’s growing security concerns, while Beijing also reportedly wants a policing agreement with the nation.
China struck a secretive security pact with Papua New Guinea’s near-neighbour Solomon Islands in 2022, which included police aid and has raised concerns that a Chinese naval base could be established in the South Pacific.
