The Associated Press

Wed, May 21, 2008 (12:47 p.m.)

A group of up to 300 young men killed 11 people who were accused of being witches and wizards in western Kenya, in some cases slitting their throats or clubbing them to death before burning their bodies, officials said.

The gang moved home to home through two villages, using a list of suspected witches and wizards and the kind of spells they were believed to have cast on the community, said Ben Makori, a local councilor.

"The villagers are complaining that the (suspected) wizards and witches are making the bright children in the community dumb ... These (suspected) witches are not doing good things to us," Makori told The Associated Press.

Deputy police spokesman Charles Owino said that the gang hunted down the eight women and three men in the western Kenya villages of Kekoro and Matembe. Most of the victims were over the age of 70, Owino said.

Senior administrator Njoroge Ndirangu said that the gang hunted down their victims Tuesday night and Wednesday morning.

A police officer, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to the media, said that investigators had little hope of making progress because the villagers had refused to identify the people who carried out attacks.

In some cases the gang pulled the victims out of their homes, slit their throats or clubbed them to death, the officer said. The victims were then thrown back into the homes that the gang already had set on fire, the officer said. He said that 36 houses were burned.

Another police officer, Mwaura Njoroge, said "it is likely that the people who committed these killings had personal vendettas against their victims."

The violence was not believed to stem from a tribal dispute since the young men and the victims were members of the same tribe.

Ndirangu, the commissioner in charge of Kisii Central district where one of the villages is located, said that residents are superstitious and have often targeted suspected witches and wizards. But this week's attack was the most shocking in recent years, Ndirangu said.