Cannibals (3 page)

The Kanaimàs enjoy the savage delight of killing and devouring human beings as part of a gruesome ritual

Along the northeast coast of South America in Guyana, there is a form of cannibalism that is known as ‘kanaimà’. This is a form of ‘assault sorcery’ where the dark sorcerers (or Kanaimàs) of the Guyana highlands mutilate and poison their victims as part of a gruesome and highly ritualized murder. This horrifying ritual can take many years to complete, and the victims all end up suffering a horrible death.

An anthropologist who visited Guyana in the 1990s, had heard of the horrifying stories of the kanaimà but believed them all to be grossly exaggerated. His original plan was to survey the area making notes about the villages, burial sites and caves so that he could write about them in detail when he returned home. However, shortly after arriving in one of the villages he was approached by a local nurse who earnestly requested that he turned his attention to the Kanaimàs instead. She told him that the practice still took place and that the natives were stalking, bludgeoning, poisoning and mutilating their victims along the forested mountain paths.

She told him that the Kanaimàs did not kill their victims immediately, they preferred to maim and intimidate them by perhaps breaking their fingers or dislocating their necks. The intention of the first attack is purely to weaken the victim. Months or even years later, the Kanaimàs will return to their victim and carry out a ferocious attack. After suffering many months, or even years, of pain, the hapless victim has his tongue pierced with snake fangs, his mouth and anus are pierced with sharp objects, and also toxic plants are inserted into the anus.

Three days after death, the sorcerer inserts a stick into the already decomposing body and then sucks the end of the stick. If the sorcerer does not carry out this ritual, he is vulnerable to revenge by the family of his victim. The victim is chosen simply because they are vulnerable and the Kanaimàs announce their intention to attack with bird-like warning calls.

These attacks against innocent, defenceless people can be considered as cannibalism because the ultimate aim is to partake a portion of the dead body as a form of protection against evil, and is thought to appease the gods of the Kanaimàs.

The anthropologist himself, Neil Whitehead, was subjected to poisoning by the Kanaimàs, which made the horrendous stories related to him even more horrifying.

It has been reported that nearly all the tribes in the Congo Basin either are, or have been, cannibals

Cannibalism is far from being dead in Africa, for it is almost impossible to control the natives who inhabit the bush. It is possible that thousands of natives are being eaten in the Congo every year, purely because it is difficult to break old habits. It is probably hard to believe but at one time or another nearly all the tribes in the Congo Basin either have been or are still cannibals. Races who, until recently, had no cannibalistic tendencies even though they were situated in a country surrounded by cannibal races, have now learned to eat human flesh.

The reason for this cannibalism is probably because they simply prefer human flesh to any other. Reports from men who have lived among cannibal races, said that they never came across a single case of them eating any kind of flesh raw; they invariably either boil, roast or smoke it. The custom of smoking flesh was to make it last longer, as sometimes the natives could go without meat for quite long periods. Smoked meat for sale in the African markets, could possibly be human flesh.

Studies of the different tribes has shown that they have a preference for various parts of the human body. Some cut long steaks from the flesh of the thighs, legs or arms; others prefer the hands and feet. Although not generally consumed, there are certain tribes who consider the head to be a real delicacy. Almost all the tribes use some part of the intestines due to the amount of fat they contain.

A missionary who spent some time with a tribe of people called the Kukukukus in the 1950s, reported a time when a party of warriors took an enemy tribesman prisoner. They tied the poor captive to a thin tree trunk and then carried him horizontally back to their village. To make sure that the prisoner did not escape, they broke both his legs by hitting them with clubs, bound him to a tree, and then adorned him with feathers and shells in preparation for their forthcoming feast. The women bought in fresh vegetables from the surrounding fields, and then the menfolk proceeded to dig a big hole in the ground to act as an oven. While all this was going on, the children were allowed to ‘play’ with the prisoner, using him as a target and eventually stoning him to death. This exercise is supposed to harden their children towards the act of killing. When the captive is no longer alive, the natives cut off his arms and legs with a bamboo knife. Next the meat is cut up into small pieces, wrapped in pieces of bark, and then cooked together with the vegetables. Such a banquet is attended by men, women and children, and is usually accompanied by dancing and jubilant songs. Apparently it is only the tribes’ enemies that are eaten, and if the captive is a a brave, young, strong warrior, the muscly parts of the body are given to the young boys of the tribe so that they can absorb the dead man’s power and courage. Cannibalism among the Kukukukus derives mainly from a shortage of meat and a deficiency of protein. Meat is indeed a rare luxury for them, and they have often been seen devouring the charred remains of rats, mice, lizards and other vermin after burning grass on the fields that surround their village.

Reports from people who have travelled through the Congo in the early 1900s, say it was difficult to pass down certain roads without seeing the horrible remains left to the jackals which the human ‘wolves’ had not found to their liking. Spotted by smouldering camp fires were the whitening bones, cracked and broken, which form the relics of ‘human’ banquets. Some of the bodies that were found along the roadside were minus their hands and feet, others had steaks cut from the thighs or elsewhere, while others had the entrails or head removed. It appeared that neither old nor young, women or children, were exempt from being served as food.

Many acts of cannibalism have been reported from time to time in the African Congo, but one that has recently been brought to light by the press is the massacring and eating of pygmies by rebels in the dense forests of the northeast. It appears that the Ituri province was completely out of control and that cannibalism was just the latest of the atrocities taking place there. Ituri’s forest-dwelling pygmy tribes were caught between fighting groups in the battles of Congo’s four-year civil war. Two of the Ugandan-backed movements captured pygmies on a regular basis and sent them into the forest in search of food and minerals. If they returned empty-handed, they were killed and eaten. Reports came back of enemy commanders feeding on the sexual organs of pygmies, believing that this would give them improved strength. Also pygmies were being forced to feed on the cooked remains of their relatives and colleagues.

It seems that cannibalism has definitely re-emerged in certain parts of the Congo. Much of the enormous area of forest is now being controlled by the Mayi-Mayi, a group of tribal militia who have been united by their beliefs and also their taste for human flesh.

Just outside the Congolese town of Bunia, a horrified mother watched as militiamen roasted and then ate the severed arms of her dying daughters. She told of how the militiamen calmly cooked the human flesh over an open fire before throwing their victims, many of them still alive, into the flames.

It is stories like this that have galvanized the world to take action and do something about the horrific cannibalism that is taking place in the Congo.

They found natives who were completely naked and living in the trees

The media were absolutely buzzing all around the world in November 1995. The reason being that an expedition led by Doctor Cesar Pérez de Tudela (a famous Spanish climber and explorer), and professor Vicente Martínez (a journalist) had discovered what was possibly the last indigenous tribe of cannibals known all over the world.

This project was the result of ten years of intense work, and six different expeditions had been carried out in the past by different explorers.

The final expedition took the Doctor and the Professor a month and it involved climbing mountains, crossing jungles, rivers and lakes. The explorers found a few villages located near the rivers of Irian Jaya (Indonesia), where they discovered the natives were totally naked and lived in the trees. The majority of the natives were totally unaware of any civilization outside of their tribe.

They live in close proximity to the ethnic groups of Korowais and Kombais, and the local authorities and people of the surrounding villages were not aware that their neighbours had been practising cannibalism for many years and indeed still are.

The expedition saw first-hand the chopped heads of the tribe’s enemies, the bodies of which had already been eaten by them. They even discovered the head of a missionary who had recently gone missing. These tribes are extremely hostile and live in very remote areas which made them very difficult to find. Although they proved that the natives ate human bodies, it is still not clear whether it is as a ritual or just their normal way of living.

An alarming thought is that cannibalism seems to be a fairly common occurrence in the former Soviet Union

In 1996 ten people were charged with the killing and eating of other people. A rough estimate by Russian police is that around 30 people were eaten in just that one year. Reports leaked out through the press that human flesh was being sold in street markets, vagrants were being eaten or their bodies being cut up and sold. Every month the Russian police were finding the corpse of a homeless person with missing body parts.

Police arrested three men and a woman on July 15, 2002, in the central Ukranian town of Zhytomyr. They were suspected of killing and cannibalizing at least six people, including an 18-year-old, in what is believed to have been a Satanic ritual. The young woman was killed in a forest and then fleshy parts of her body were removed and eaten by her murderers.

She was stabbed in the heart, scalped and also decapitated. The suspects then boiled her head in water and proceeded to eat pieces from it. The suspects were apprehended when they went to meet the young girl’s parents to collect a $3,000 ransom.

Police were called out to a home of a former convict in the city of Sebastopol in March 1996. Although they were used to dealing with some quite horrific murder cases, nothing could have prepared them for the carnage they were about to discover.

When the police entered the house they found the mutilated remains of human bodies that had been prepared for consumption. The owner of the flat, her mother and her boyfriend, had all been stabbed to death by the 33-year-old suspect. Not only had their bodies been neatly butchered, but the investigators also found the internal organs from two of the victims in a saucepan on the stove in the kitchen. On the table was a plate which had on it a freshly roasted piece of human flesh.

‘Pelmeni’ is the Russian equivalent of ravioli. In the year 1996 a man was arrested in the coal mining town of Kemerovo after he openly admitted to killing and cutting up a friend, and using his flesh to fill his pelmeni. This crime was discovered when some vagrants were scavenging through a rubbish dump and they uncovered a severed human head. Investigators were soon to learn that the rest of the body had been minced up, put into pelmeni, and subsequently sold at cut-price rates on the local market.

Nikolai Dzhurmongaliev, known as 'Metal Fang' because of his white metal false teeth, is possibly the king of the Soviet cannibals, slaughtering and serving up around 100 women to his dinner guests in the Russian republic of Kyargyzstan. Nikolai is known to have used at least 47 of his victims to make ethnic recipes for many of his neighbours.

Nikolai’s belief was that women and prostitution were the root of all evil. His evil doings were not discovered until two of his friends found a head and some intestines in his kitchen. He was immediately incarcerated in a lunatic asylum in Tashkent, but amazingly enough he managed to bribe his way out of the institution. His case went to trial and he was found guilty of only seven murders. Once again he was put into an asylum but managed to escape in 1989.

Embarrassed by their failure to keep him locked up, the Russian authorities never admitted to the public that Nikolai had escaped, and spent two years trying to recapture him. They eventually managed to track him down in Uzbekistan. The Interior Minister, Colonel Yuri Dubyagin described him as, ‘absolutely normal, but at one point he got a taste for female flesh’. Nikolai himself admitted that two women could provide him with enough delicate meat to keep him going for a whole week.

The attitude of this minister may possibly explain why there are so many high-scoring serial killers in Russia. Nikolai Dzhurmongaliev was considered not to be responsible for his actions, and he is once again under lock and key in a mental institution.

Two cases of cannibalism were reported in 2003 that involved prison inmates. Convicts that were kept in overcrowded prisons killed and ate their cellmates, claiming that they were being underfed and that they wanted to relieve the cramped conditions.

In 1996, a twice-convicted murderer, Andrei Maslich, along with another inmate, killed and ate a fellow prisoner. Offering no other explanation than the fact that he did not want to share his cell with anyone, Andrei, who was only 24 at the time, strangled his cellmate and then cut out his liver with a shard of broken glass. He placed the liver in his drinking mug along with some water, and then made a makeshift fire out of his bedding on which to cook his ‘supper’. Both men told authorities that they were bored and wanted to visit Moscow, where they expected they would be sent for psychiatric examinations. Instead, the two men were sentenced to death.

Another case of cannibalism was reported in the Semipalatinsk prison in Kazakstan. Four convincts blamed their actions on the fact that the prison diet was inadequate and on newspaper articles they had read regarding instances of cannibalism in prison. The four inmates made a pact that they would kill and eat the first ‘new guy’ to be placed in their cell, and this just happened to be a convict named Volchenkov. They kept to their word and killed him, cutting the meat from his arms and back, cooking it and eating it. Some of the flesh was fried on a hot plate while other parts were boiled in an electric kettle which was kept in their cell.

Bergen-Belsen was a concentration camp established in 1943 originally to hold prisoners to be used in political exchanges. Administered by the SS, it included five sub-camps where some 50,000 Jews, political hostages, and other prisoners died of starvation, disease, brutality and sadistic medical practices.

Bergen-Belsen was liberated by the British in 1945. Inside the camp the horrified soldiers found piles of dead and rotting corpses and thousands of sick and starving prisoners kept in severely overcrowded and dirty compounds. The stench was intolerable even though the air was quite cold. The ground was muddy and a pile of corpses balanced carefully on one another, rose geometrically like a haystack. This was due to the fact that there was no more room in the crematoria. The Russian prisoners who had been incarcerated in this open-air camp were given no food or water. Driven by starvation, people went mad, and eventually many turned to cannibalism.

The grim discovery of a terrible murder involving cannibalism in the small town of Berezniki, in Perm Oblast, unfolded when a man brought a package of human flesh to the police station. He told them that he had bought the meat on the street, but his wife, on discovering skin on it, told her husband to take it to the police.

The police managed to establish the identities of the traders, who turned out to be F. A. Boldyshev, who had previous convictions, and his friend N. V. Ostanin. These traders, however, turned out to be the murderers as well. It appeared that they had been sharing a bottle of spirits with a third man, A. P. Vavilin, when things got out of hand and they murdered him. Next they dismembered his corpse and had one of their mothers cook up the best pieces of flesh. After gorging themselves on their human feast, the two men packaged up the remainder and sold it on the streets. They claimed they had committed the act in order to obtain some money for their next bottle of spirits and to save money on the cost of normal meat. Police discovered the remains of Vavilin’s head, hands and feet discarded in the attic of one of their houses.

Twenty-seven-year-old Sasha Spesivtsev decided to take it into his own hands to cleanse the Russian streets of permissiveness. He killed at least 19 street children whom he saw as the dregs of society. The unemployed former mental patient, lured his homeless victims from the streets and local train stations in his home town of Novokuznetsk, back to his house. It was here, with the help of his mother, that Spesivtsev murdered his victims and then ate them.

Suspicions that there might be a serial killer active in the area surfaced in the summer of 1996 when body parts appeared in the river Aba near the school where Sasha’s mother, Lyudmila, worked. However, the investigation moved rather slowly due to the nature of the victims – the poor children of the forgotten underclass – and the inept Russian judicial beaurocracy. During the early stages of the investigation, one of Sasha’s neighbours repeatedly complained to the police of the nauseating stench and deafening music coming from Sasha’s apartment. However, no investigation ensued, even though in 1991 a teenage girl was found dead in Sasha’s house. A year later, when police finally entered his home they found 15-year-old Olga Galtseva dying on the couch with multiple stab wounds to her stomach. In the bathroom they found a headless corpse and in the living room there was a rib cage.

Before she died, Olga managed to tell the police that she, together with two 13-year-old friends, helped Sasha’s mother carry some bags into her apartment. Once inside they were trapped by Sasha and a fierce dog. No trace of Olga’s two little friends was ever found, and the police can only assume that they also died. A search of Spesivtsev’s apartment revealed 80 bloodstained pieces of clothing, and DNA tests established that none of them contained blood from anyone in Spesivtsev’s family.

Sasha was eventually committed after being convicted of murdering his girlfriend. In prison he spends all his time undergoing psychiatric testing and writing poems about the evils of democracy. His mother, on the other hand, has withdrawn into herself and has not uttered a word since her arrest.

On July 3, 1997, 38-year-old Vladimir Nikolayev was sentenced to death for the murdering and cannibalising two people in the town of Novocheboksary. Already on police records as a paricularly dangerous criminal, investigators found a pan of roasted human meat on the stove and another in the oven, when they went to arrest Nikolayev at his apartment. More bodies had been stored in the snow on the apartment’s balcony, bodies which Nikolayev claimed he was storing to eat later on. When questioned later by an investigator, Nikolayev jokingly asked the officer if he would be prepared to make him a dinner using his own stores of human meat.

Manturovo is a quiet little town of around 22,000 inhabitants, situated on the tributary of the Volga river, but it was soon to be shaken by a case of cannibalism. Valentina Dolbilina, a 36-year-old mother of a four-year-old boy, and 28-year-old Vitaly Bezrodnov, a factory worker, were both accused of killing their drinking partner and then cooking and eating his flesh.

Dolbilina and Bezrodnov had been out for a night of heavy drinking. Bezrodnov said that he was feeling hungry and would like to eat some juicy meat. They eyed up their drinking partner who was asleep in the corner in a drunken stupor. However, they said that he was too skinny to be of any use to them, and they packed him off home. Then their attention turned to the fourth member of their drinking party, who had more flesh on him. Luring him back to Dolbilina’s house, they ushered him into the tiny kitchen where Bezrodnov asked Dolbilina for something heavy. She immediately went and fetched and axe, and their hapless victim was hit on the head, beheaded, undressed and then cut up into pieces. When they had finished their grisly deed, some 15 pounds of meat was cut from the thigh and rump, and put into a frying pan.

The smell of the cooking meat aroused her sleeping flatmate, Boris Komarov, who came into the room and asked if he could join in the feast. However, despite the effects of a night of drinking, Boris noticed that there was something strange about the meat he was eating, and stated that ‘it was a bit tough’. To put his mind at ease, Bezrodnov claimed that they had killed a stray dog on their way home, and that it was canine flesh that he was consuming. Reassured by Bezrodnov’s explanation, Boris kept on eating the joint of meat straight from the pan. Little did he realise the true ghastliness of the situation – the dead man he was eating was his own brother, Leonid.

The horror of the situation did not end there, however, even Dolbilina’s own son, Roma, was served a slice of the hapless Leonid. Later, when questioned, the boy blurted out: ‘Mummy killed a man and served him up to her friends.’

Russian police are currently investigating a possible case of cannibalism in which an elderly woman is suspected of having stored bits and pieces of her dead husband in her refrigerator. The 83-year-old victim was found lying outside the couple’s Kalingrad flat with parts of his body missing. When they searched the apartment, police found tin cans with the remains of muscles and meat in the refrigerator. Conclusive tests are still to be carried out.

Whatever the results, this case pales in comparison to that of Ilshat Kuzikov, a 35-year-old schizophrenic.