Albinos continue to be ‘hunted down like animals’ for their limbs in Tanzania, according to reports.
Families are said to be trading in their own loved ones in a bid for money and influence from some of the country’s most powerful people.
It is believed in the African country that albino body parts will bring a person wealth or luck, with people willing to pay as much as $3,000 to $4,000 for a limb, or as much as $75,000 for the whole body, the MailOnline reports.
As a result, people with albinism are often attacked by people who wish to chop off their limbs, leaving them mutilated, or in many cases, dead.
Albinism affects one in 1,400 people in Tanzania, which experts put down to incest in rural communities in the country.
It is a hereditary condition which causes the complete absence of pigmentation in the skin, hair and eyes.
Since records began, there have been 74 murders, with 59 people with albinism surviving attacks, while 16 graves have been robbed for body parts, however there are believed to be many more unrecorded.
The most recent case recorded was four-year-old Pendo Emmanuelle Nundi, who was abducted from her home in December. Her father and uncle were both arrested in connection with her disappearance, however even with a reward of £1,130 offered up by police, she still hasn’t been found.
Mwigulu Matonange was only 10 when he was attacked by two men on his way home from school. The men chopped off his left arm, before disappearing into the jungle.
After the brutal attack, which took place in February 2014, he told IPP Media: ‘I was held down like a goat about to be slaughtered.’
In this case, the men were complete strangers to Mwiglulu, however there’s suspicion surrounding Pendo’s father after he took half-an-hour to report her abduction, despite there being neighbours around who could’ve helped as soon as she was taken.
According to a UN report, a 38-year-old woman was attacked by her husband and four other men while she was sleeping in February 2013 while their eight-year-old daughter looked on.
As reported by the MailOnline, Josephat Torner, who campaigns for albino rights, asked:
Now we can see the parents who are involved in planning the attacks. What kind of war are we fighting if parents and family do this? Who can we trust?
You do not know who is your enemy.
People with the albinism are being hunted and killed for our body parts. It is because people want to become rich.
We are still living in danger. It is because people, they have different ideas. Some people, they are thinking they should get our body parts and sell to different places.
The question is, why? Why now? And who is behind the killings?
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Emma Rosemurgey is an NCTJ trained Journalist who started her career by producing The Royal Rosemurgey newspaper in 2004, which kept her family up to date with the goings on of her sleepy north east village. She graduated from the University of Central Lancashire in Preston and started her career in regional newspapers before joining Tyla (formerly Pretty 52) in 2017, and progressing onto UNILAD in 2019.