Albino murders return

This news article was translated by Jean Burke from Nipashe, a Kiswahili newspaper in Tanzania. It is about the recent killing of an albino child.

At the same time that the wave of murders against people with albinism has died down over recent months, a little girl of four years of age was murdered and her limbs cut off in the village of Kasebuzi, of Kitahana ward, Kibondo district in Kigoma Region.

The District commissioner of Kibondo, Danhi Makanga stated that the child who was murdered was Naimana Daudi who was taken in the dead of night by those killers after puncturing the wall and entering inside where she was asleep with her parents and other relatives.

He said after taking the girl and carrying her a distance of about six hundred meters the people cut off her left leg and arm then disappeared with those limbs and left the child bleeding so the body was found with lots of blood draining out.

Makanga who leads the security and safety committee of this district, has explained to hundreds of locals of the village that the government will hunt for those killers by all means and that this event has shocked the government because of the brutality carried out on this child.

Following this incident the district commissioner of Kibondo district called for a referendum right then and there in which locals participated to nominate people suspected of involvement and who often receive strange visitors in the village.

The child’s father, Daud Juma who also has another albino child aged one and a half years old said they were all sleeping in the room, and they didn’t know what was going on until the time of five in the morning when they wanted to wake the children up to pass water and then they discovered that their child was not inside.

When discussing this, with tears springing up, he said they started shouting for help and when the neighbours woke up they reported to the police who arrived and started working with the villagers following the stream of blood until they found the child’s body which had been abandoned with the left leg and arm cut off.

The head of investigations of Kigoma region, Joseph Konyo said that up to now three people, whose names are withheld, have been arrested by the Kigoma regional police force suspected of involvement in this incident.

This incident takes the number of people with albinism murdered in the Kigoma region since the year before last to reach four.