5 women accused of being witches beaten to death in India

But it's amid the jungled slopes and chilly mists of the Highlands that the most virulent superstitions have persisted. Steep and remote, both spooky and forbiddingly beautiful, the Highlands represent the archetypal PNG, a "lost world" of hidden valleys and blue-green peaks, of gorges and waterfalls and prehistoric flowers. Highlanders are famously volatile and invariably well armed: virtually every male over the age of two carries a bush knife or long-handled axe. They also possess what Gibbs describes as a "pre-Enlightenment, or Biblical, world view ... They don't believe in coincidence or accidents. When something bad happens, they don't ask what did it but who did it."

All of which explains - or partly explains - what happened to Janet Kemo. Kemo lives in a mud hut on the outskirts of Goroka, the capital of Eastern Highlands Province. A gnomish woman with wrists like twigs, she never went to school and cannot read or write. She does not know her own age, though suspects she might have been born after independence, in 1975. In 2011 she was the second wife of a man called Kemo Fogodi, who became ill with what turned out to be tuberculosis. When Fogodi began coughing up blood - a sure sign of sorcery - Kemo was accused by her husband's family of using witchcraft to kill him. Early one morning, while her husband lay helplessly ill nearby, she was hauled out of bed by a group of 15 men, one of whom tied a chain around her neck. She was then dragged 800 metres up a muddy track, through a forest, and tied to a mango tree, where she was tortured for 12 hours.