SUPERSTITION AND CRIME IN BURMA.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 13835, 23 February 1907, Page 5

SUPERSTITION AND CRIME IN BURMA.

—A Terrible Tale.—

A Rangoon message in The Englishman (Calcutta) says the monotony of life in Burma is relieved occasionally by marvellous happenings unknown in other countries, and due invariably to the surprising credulity of the Burmese in charms and magical medicines. In the Chief Court, Rangoon, an appeal was being heard, urged by three Burmans against tho sentence of transportation for life passed by the Sessions Judge of Prome for the murder of a Burmese lad (Slvtre Tat), 13 years of age, and the evidence in the case disclosed a story of peculiar horror, illustrating the mad lengths to which their gullibility leads the race. . In Thapangyo, a- village of the Prome district, lives a Burmese soothsayer and alchemist, claiming ability to prepare the elixir of life and other magical drugs, He told the appellants and others that if one took from a freshly'dead human being blood from the throat, tho flesh of the face, the tongue, ears, nose, and' eyeballs,'and ground these up and mixed 1 them with medicine, the resulting product, if thrown at a man, or at a house, would cause the object aimed at to burst, into flame, and that the fire thus brought about could not be extinguished by wafer. On April 9, at a. Burmese theatre at the village, two of the appellants induced the murdered lad, Sliwe Tat, who was witnessing the play with another boy, to accompany them, promising to give him. some duck's eggs. At the edge of the neighbouring jungle the third appellant joined them, and the latter first struck the boy on the head with a bamboo, the others doing likewise, and felled him to the ground. They then with a clasp knife cut off the flesh from his face, his nose, ears, and tongue, and gouged out his eyes, cutting his throat also, and taking some blood and' putting it into a bottle. The civil surgeon's evidence was to tho effect that from the head the flesh was practically cleaned away, -while the inside of the mouth, and windpipe appeared to have been torn or gnawed away. The skull was crushed in at both sides, and part of the bone was missing. The murderers took the flc-sh and blood to the soothsayer, who, mixing all with dntgs, ground the mess in a stone mill. The following day the boy's body was discovered. One of the murderers, who had been 6een whispering to him at the theatre, was arrested, and made a clean breast of the horrid story. The knife and bottle of blood and the paste into which the flesh had been reduced were all found at the soothsayer's house. The sessions judge acquitted the'soothsayer owing to inconclusive evidence, and owing to the youth of-tho appellants refrained from passing capital sentence on them.