Samaru Madkami, a teenage Christian convert, was killed on 4 June by a group who reportedly cut up his body into pieces.
Pastor Bijay said the group (thought to be Hindu radicals, some of whom did not live locally) ganged up to kidnap Christians in the remote Kenduguda village. Madkami’s father filed a report saying that a group of villagers picked up his son at around 11pm and told him that they needed him for a meeting in the jungle. When they returned to abduct the father an hour later, he escaped to a police station.
Both father and son had been Christians for just three years.
Two other boys abducted at the same time were able to escape, but Madkami was beaten to death after accusations that he practiced witchcraft. His neck was cut, his head crushed with a rock, and he was then cut up into pieces and buried in a pit. A police inspector said that Madkami’s body was exhumed three days after his killing.
Pastor Bijay said: ‘Samaru was a passionate Christian. He always shared from the Bible with youth and children from the village’. Madkami told the pastor recently that he would take up the ministry should anything ever happen to the pastor.
