Indian cannibals: Accused cooked, ate Kerala woman after cutting her into 56 pieces

The Kerala couple and an 'occultist' arrested on charges of murdering two women after performing an occult ritual over a four-month period allegedly told the police that they chopped the body of one of the two women into 56 pieces, cooked some pieces and ate it, people familiar with the matter said on Wednesday. The three were remanded in judicial custody by a Pathanamthitta court.

Kochi police commissioner CH Nagaraju said the victims were killed in the "most brutal way" by Mohd Shafi, who took sadistic pleasure to torture the victims, and brutalised the two women before they were beheaded. "He is basically a hardened criminal… a psychopath," Nagaraju told reporters at a news conference on Wednesday.

Mohd Shafi and a Kerala couple, Bhagaval Singh and his wife, Laila, were arrested on Tuesday in connection with the murder of two women in a span of four months in Elanthoor in Pathanamthitta which later unfolded the shocking tale of greed and superstition. Both victims in their fifties, Padma and Roselin, were lottery vendors and reportedly trapped by promising financial benefits.

As the initial details of the case emerged on Tuesday, the dark grisly details of a couple agreeing to human sacrifice in India's most literate state, shocked people. Abducting and killing people for wealth and superstitious beliefs is a crime beyond imagination in a state such as Kerala, chief minister Pinarayi Vijayan said.

The Kerala high court also took note of the reports. "The fact that we are hearing about the human sacrifice in Kerala is beyond shocking," justice Devan Ramachandran said in an off-the-cuff remark during a hearing into another case.

Mohd Shafi, the man who prodded the couple looking for a better life to agree to human sacrifice - police said he was paid ₹1.5 lakh for getting the first woman to the couple's house - has eight cases registered against him including rape of a 75-year-old woman in Kolencherry in 2020. Shafi, who then worked as a truck driver, was arrested in this case and in jail for about a year. After being released on bail, 52-year-old Shafi shifted his base to Gandhi Nagar in Kochi earlier this year.

A police officer said Shafi was arrested in only three of the eight cases registered against him. In the remaining three, the police could not catch him.

In her statement to the police, Bhagaval Singh's wife Laila told the police that Shafi persuaded them to eat a small portion of the sacrifice for the best results. Senior police officers close to the investigations said the victims were tortured for an hour before they were finally beheaded and their bodies dismembered.

Kochi city police commissioner Nagaraju said they weren't revealing details of the torture. "They are really horrifying," he said.

Shafi is being treated as the prime accused in the case; legally the couple who followed his advice and paid for the crime are equally culpable. Nagaraju said the investigators have not been able to decode how Shafi, a school dropout, was able to convince the couple to agree to human sacrifice.

Nagaraju said the two women's body parts were buried in different parts of Bhagaval Singh's compound in Elanthoor and acknowledged that it was only because the police acted on Padma's missing report filed on September 27 that they stumbled upon the two grisly crimes.