Villagers in West Java are beheading people they say are sorcerers.

Police are investigating 19 killings of ‘black shamen” but believe many more could have gone unreported in the remote villages of the Indonesian island .

One 70-year-old woman has been hacked to death by a mob after she gave some fish to a sick neighbour who died several weeks later. Villagers claim other people she had been in contact with had either died or fallen ill.

Inspector Widodo, of Cianjur Police Station, say most of the claims of sorcery are false and the murders are in fact the result of political or business rivalries, reports the Straits Times.

While villagers often join in the killings because they believe the claims to be true, most are actually carried out by an organised network of ‘black shamen assassins’.

For IDR1,000,000 (about £75) they will begin a rumour of someone being a sorcerer then, when the village is convinced, carry out the execution.

Anthropologist Anto Ahadiat says villagers are enacting street justice because the country’s political leadership has broken down traditional village structures.

In the past shamen were rarely killed – instead people went to a more powerful one to counteract any spell they thought had been passed on them.