Two Pakistani brothers have been arrested on suspicion of eating a young child. Mohammad Arif Ali and Mohammad Farman Ali were arrested after neighbours reported the stench of rotten flesh coming from their house in Pakistan’s Punjab province.
Police say they recovered the severed head of a child.
Superintendent of Police Ameer Ali Khan described the scene at Arif Ali’s house on Monday to the BBC: “We found the severed head of a young child, about two or three years old. They probably dug up his body from a grave, but the identity of the child and the graveyard from where his body might have been stolen is not clear.”
He added: “During initial interrogation, Arif has admitted they chopped the body and cooked it, but blames it all on his elder brother and denies he either helped him or devoured the curry,”
Ali and his brother Mohammad Farman were previously jailed for two years for stealing the body a dead woman from her grave, chopping up her limbs and making them into a curry. Since Pakistan has no law against cannibalism, they were sentenced under a law against the desecration of a grave.
Local police said at the time that they believed the two men had dug up more than 100 corpses from a local graveyard and eaten them.
Both men were married with children, but their wives left them after their gruesome crimes came to light.
There were public protests in their local town of Dharya Khan when the pair were released from jail last year. The brothers have tried to keep a low profile, and, when questioned by the BBC in August last year, Arif Ali did not answer questions coherently.
He did say, however, that he hoped such an incident would not happen again.
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