Siblings slaughter ‘possessed’ father

RASHEED KIDWAI

Bhopal, June 27: One man was drowned in the Sindh last week by his son for being afflicted with leprosy and, now, the slaughter of another in the state, allegedly by his two daughters, for being “possessed” has rocked the region.

Yasmin, 22, and Taslima, 25, believed that “Iblis”, the great Satan, had possessed their father, said police.

They locked their ailing father, Yunus Mian, in a room, bound him up with chains and slaughtered him. The siblings then danced around his corpse.

Officials said the siblings’ claim of having drunk their father’s blood and eaten some of his organs would be confirmed during post-mortem.

He had not been keeping well for some time and family members were of the opinion that he had been afflicted by some evil supernatural power — namely, Djinns.

In keeping with this line of thinking, Yunus was being administered occult treatment during the course of which it was suspected that the two sisters had also got “possessed”. The family, however, felt that while Yunus was under the spell of “Satan”, the girls were under the spell of “good Djinns”.

 

 

YOU DON'T WANT TO LIVE THERE

The modern era of totalitarianism in Paraguay got under way in 1814 with the rule of President Dr. Gaspar Rodriguez Francia, an ascetic, paranoid meglomaniac who liked to be known as El Supremo. Francia turned the country into a police state: he closed the borders, shot all the dogs, founded the secret service and insisted that people salute him by doffing their hats, including otherwise naked Indians who were forced to carry little hatless brims specifically for that purpose.

When his sister married without his consent, he executed her, her husband and the priest who married them. He died in 1840 in a thunderstorm during a fit of apoplexy and was promptly dismembered and fed to alligators.

Francia was followed by the spectacularly nasty Lopez dynasty, which culminated in the rule of Francisco Solano Lopez, a bloated, debauched, self-styled Napoleon who, egged on by Eliza Lynch, his irrepressibly corrupt Irish doxy, declared war simultaneously on Brazil, Uruguay and Argentina.

By the time the fighting was over, 90 percent of the male population was dead.

The Paraguayans displayed a suicidal bravery to the end, and a macabre sense of humor. ("If a Paraguayan in the midst of his comrades was blown to pieces by a shell, " one observer wrote, "they would yell with delight, thinking it a capital joke, in which they would have been joined by the victim himself had he been capable.")

Lopez was finally bayoneted in a bog and then raised to the status of national hero by another strongman, Alfredo Stroessner, child molester, torturer and architect of the dictatorship that made Paraguay a home away from home for the likes of Josef Mengele.

-Ben Macintyre, The New York Times Book Review, 2/29/04