Witch burnings, torture and cannibalism: How Australias nearest neighbour and one of the most primitive places on Earth remains the most dangerous place to be a woman

When they came for her the second time, Angeline Kepari Leniata could not escape the mob determined to torture and burn her alive as a witch. 

It was time for her to die: to pack her mouth with rags, blindfold her, bind her limbs and tie her to a pole and carry her to the place where they burn women accused of witchcraft: the Warakum Junction rubbish dump in south central Mount Hagen. 

Angeline had fled sorcery rumours in her remote village in Enga Province and sought sanctuary in Mount Hagen, in Papua New Guineas Western Highlands, but the allegations she was a witch had followed her there.

Papua New Guinea is Australias closest northern neighbour, located just six kilometres from Australian territory at Boigu Island in the Torres Strait. 

But even in the 21st century, and in the nations third-largest city to where Angeline had escaped, the belief in sorcery remained dangerously strong in a society with one foot still in the Stone Age.

Despite a fast-growing economy due to its abundant natural resources of gold, copper and oil, in PNGs rugged mountainous areas, dark practices and a belief in spirits - and even vampires - continue. 

To this day, the UN estimates there are 200 killings of witches in PNG annually.

Before Angelines savage murder in 2013, there had been at least two known witch burnings at the Warakum dump since 2009.

Pictured: the witch burning of Angeline Kepari Leniata at the Warakum town dump in Mount Hagen in 2013, after the 20-year-old was accused of sorcery following the death of a boy

A mob stuffed Angelines mouth with rags, bound her, doused her with petrol and struck a match as hundreds watched. The young mother (pictured in 2009) took 30 minutes to die

And in 2012, police arrested 29 people for killing and cannibalising the brains and genitals of seven people accused of sorcery. 

The following year, when a six-year-old boy died in Mt Hagen General Hospital, probably from rheumatic fever, his family decided Angeline was to blame.

She was pronounced that most dreaded of PNG words: sanguma.

Sanguma, which translates as black magic or sorcery, means to some that a woman is inhabited by an invisible, flying, contagious creature that eats peoples hearts.

Men and children can be targeted, but its mostly women, and almost always vulnerable women: widows, the infirm or mentally ill, and single mothers like Angeline.

An advocate holds a photo of an attempted witch burning in 2012 of a woman accused of sorcery. She was stripped, tied up, tortured with hot iron bars and was about to be burnt alive before Catholic officials rescued her. She is now in hiding in another province

Pretty 20-year-old Angeline, a mother-of-one, was declared a witch with a demon living inside her.

She was kidnapped by the boys male relatives, gagged, bound, tortured with a heated iron rod and doused with petrol.

Her public execution drew a crowd of hundreds, who stood silently but with their camera phones recording, as a match was struck, truck tyres thrown onto the pyre and Angeline burnt to her death.

The surprising number of onlookers who failed to save her included police, who later said they were helpless due to being outnumbered by her executioners.

According to one account by an onlooker who had gathered to watch, she didnt die quickly... it took about 30 minutes. 

After her mothers murder, Angelines younger daughter, aged about two, was placed with an uncle in a village 160km away from Mount Hagen.

But daughters of witches are also often considered suspect, and the girl was always treated as an outcast.

Four years later, in 2017, when the girl was six years old, one of her female cousins  fell ill and a group of her young male relatives came for the girl.

They tied her up and tortured her with hot knives, keeping her captive for days while demanding she give back her sick cousins heart.

Only the arrival of a Lutheran missionary, Anton Lutz, saved her life when Lutz threatened to send in the army or the police if they did not release her.

Lutz had been sent by PNG human rights activist Ruth Kissam to rescue the child, whom she has since adopted.

Members of the Raskol gang Dirty Dons 585, in the 9 Mile Settlement, Port Moresby. The gang committed a set of rapes and armed robberies and admit two-thirds of their victims are women

Three months after Angeline Leniatas public burning, in May 2013, Papua New Guineas parliament repealed the 1971 Sorcery Act.

It had offered a reduced sentence to anyone who committed assault or murder if they sincerely believed their victim had been committing acts of sorcery.

But the move, which allowed harsher penalties for Sorcery Accusation Related Violence (SARV), did not reduce witch burnings. 

In 2021, the Australian National Universitys Development Policy Centre (DevPol) analysed two decades of PNG court cases involving SARV, and found on average only 12 people a year were convicted for sorcery-related violence.

That figure was low compared to the rates of SARV-related criminal activity throughout the country - convictions only sought for sorcery murders.

Because of its supernatural nature, sanguma was not only used to explain events like sickness, sudden death or car accidents. The PNG National Research Unit, in a 2021 paper about SARV in Enga Province, said sanguma was increasingly being used to explain economic misfortune, business failure, unemployment and marriage breakdowns.

People would call on a glasman (diviner) who would be paid to reveal the truth, point the finger of blame at a person, and advise on a fitting course of action.

The study found sorcery-related violence had been relatively rare in Enga, a rugged mountainous region in west-central PNG, before 2010.

Julie, 19, was attacked at the age of nine months by her father who chopped off her leg. She now lives with a prosthesis. When she went to the city of Lae to be fitted with a new prosthetic limb, she was raped by local gang members and impregnated with her son James (left)

It has since grown in popularity and, of the people accused of sorcery over a four-year period up to 2020, most were women - only 22 of the 307 victims were men. 

Sanguma is so secretive, the communities so remote, that the vast majority of incidences slip under the radar, according to PNG newspaper The National.

In 2014, a witch hunt in Madang Province, on PNGs northern coast, left seven people dead, including two children, as well as dozens injured and houses burnt down.

Several hundred men from Raicoast village armed with machetes descended on Sasiko village, looking for people they believed to be sorcerers.

Police arrested 180 men and youths, and charged 97 of them with murder. 

Two weeks later, the PNG cabinet announced it was reinstating the death penalty.

PNGs prime minister at the time, Peter ONeill, said violent crimes were becoming too frequent and the people of PNG want criminals punished severely and the death penalty would be an effective deterrent. 

He said gang rapists would face life in prison with no chance of parole, and cannabis dealers up to 50 years in jail.

His cabinet would consider setting up a prison for high-risk offenders on an isolated island. The country has 600 islands in its total land mass of 452,860 square kilometres.

The same year, Mr ONeill publicly apologised to all women, and parliament passed a Family Protection Bill that, for the first time in PNG history, criminalised domestic violence. 

Troubled Enga Province, in the PNG highlands, is plagued by violence, including the countrys deadliest outbreak in February 2024, and the burning or drowning of accused witches

In 2018, after many delays in the Madang massacre case, 88 were sentenced to life in prison and eight men were sentenced to death.

Massacres, gang rapes and sorcery-related attacks continue unabated, with belief in sanguma spreading with the use of social media.

Port Moresby, the PNG capital, is considered to be one of the most dangerous cities in the world, where raskol crime gangs carry out violent robberies, carjackings and pack rapes.

Residents, especially foreign visitors, must hole up in armed compounds, and golf courses and other sporting areas are protected by guards armed with machetes and guns.

Peter Moses, one of the leaders of the Dirty Dons 585 raskol gang, stated that raping women was a must for young members of the gang.

Speaking to Vlad Sokhin, the award-winning documentary maker and photographer who chronicled witch burnings and PNG violence a decade ago, Moses boasted about raping women.

Moses said: And it is better if a boy kills her afterwards; there will be less problems with the police.

More recent outbreaks of violence in Papua New Guinea have come under the spotlight as the country hopes to unite its people and forge closer ties with Australia through a national passion: rugby league.

PNG is rugby league mad, and tilting at becoming the NRLs 18th team, with Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese urging it to happen as a way of playing geopolitics and curbing Chinas influence.

Resource-rich PNG lies at the centre of the Pacific battleground between the U.S. - with its allies of Japan and Australia - and China.

Rugby league-mad PNG (above, fans at Port Moresby stadium in 2017) has joined the NRL, in an act of footy regional diplomacy which will see the PNG Hunters start playing in 2028

According to think tank the Lowy Institute, China has already pledged almost $6billion on more than 200 projects in the region since 2011.

Apart from signing Australias own security pact with PNG, Mr Albanese sees footy diplomacy as going a long way between the two countries - and a game the Chinese dont play.

Albanese wants a Port Moresby-based team, with games to also be played in Cairns, as a way to counter Chinas growing influence in the region.   

In February 2024, as the NRL was still finalising the $600million deal to have them enter our biggest football competition, PNG was exploding in an unprecedented outbreak of violence.

An ambush saw 64 people shot dead in a major escalation of tribal fighting in Enga Province.

A dead body lies on the road near Wabag in Enga Province in February this year after PNGs worst-ever outbreak of violence due to an escalation in tribal fighting

Police were devastated it had happened despite their lockdown on the supply of firearms and ammunition supercharging deadly violence in the highlands. 

The ambush involved the same tribes that had killed more than 60 people over the previous year.

Meanwhile PNG was working on its deal to join the NRL by 2028 and become a feeder team for aspiring young players in the country.

There were also discussions over security fears surrounding rugby league boss Peter Vlandys desire to base the PNG Hunters in Port Moresby.

Then in July, there was another massacre, again in the highlands.

Bodies piled up near Wabag town in February after warring tribes engaged in a gun battle after police failed to lock down the supply of firearms and ammunition supercharging deadly violence in the highlands

This time it was in East Sepiks Angoram district: gangs of young men raped women before killing them, murdering a total of 26 people including 16 children.

More than 30 young men from a gang called I dont care rampaged through the villages of Tamara, Tambari and Angrumara, assaulting the women and young girls and then slashing them and young children with machetes.

Volker Türk, the UN high commissioner for human rights, said he was horrified by the shocking eruption of deadly violence, seemingly as the result of a dispute over land and lake ownership and user rights.

The group armed with guns, machetes and wire catapults attacked Angrumara village, burned houses and killed an elderly man and a 5-year-old boy.

In the aftermath of the massacre, many were still missing and there were fears the number of dead could rise to 50. Hundreds of villagers whose homes were torched were forced to flee.

Prime Ministers XIII players receive a rapturous reception in Port Moresby 

Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and PNG Prime Minister James Marape are seen at the international womens football match between their two countries in Brisbane in 2022 

According to the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project, a global violence watch group, these killings were just the latest spike in a rising trend of violence.

Tribal fighting in PNG has become deadlier in recent years with the influx of guns. Traditional rules of conflict have eroded to include rape, mutilation and arson.

Since the two massacres this year, PNG police have appealed to the tribes to lay down arms. But without the ultimate deterrent, one senior officer said, its difficult to lead people away from ancient beliefs.

Enga Provincial Police Commander Chief Inspector Epenes Nili explained that with the countless number of sorcery cases he deals with, only the the threat of capital punishment could stop them.

He described rescuing three ladies in a remote area, who had been blamed for the death of a local man and taken down to a river.

Enga police Chief Inspector Epenes Nili (pictured) described how a mob of 400 men surrounded three women accused of sorcery and demanded they walk on water, which would prove they were witches, or sink and down, which would prove their innocence

A mob of up to 400 men and boys had surrounded the women and told them to walk on the water, which would prove they were witches, or sink, which would prove their innocence.

They said the ladies must raise up the dead man. I took ten police with me and my troops. We were there to 8pm, then 10pm, 11pm, 12 midnight, Mr Nili said.

Then the good lord intervened and they said, "Okay, you take the dead body and give the direction to the ladies to raise him up and we want to see our man tomorrow on the bus coming back to our village." 

I took the body and the three ladies back to Wabag police station and I locked the ladies in a police cell for their own protection.

If a man is convicted of a sorcery killing, he must be sentenced to death, not life in prison. I believe if one Engan is sentenced to death, that new will spread and end the problem.

But in 2022, PNGs prime minister James Marape, who is still in office, repealed the death penalty, and stated those on death row would instead serve sentences of life without parole.

Mr Marapes reasons were that Papua New Guinea was a Christian nation and cited the unavailability of any humane means to carry out executions.