ZAMBOANGA CITY, 10 August 2004 — A man was butchered to death and his flesh eaten before his body was burned on a remote village in the central Philippine island of Palawan, police said yesterday.
Police said the gory incident occurred last month, but it was only reported late yesterday by a television network GMA 7.
Some drunken villagers who attended a wedding party also feasted on the flesh that had been taken home by four men that killed Benjie Ganoy, police said.
It said the victim had gone missing on July 17 after attending the party, but a witness to the murder Junie Buyot surrendered a week later to the police and told investigators of gory details about the murder and cannibalism that took place on a village called Aramaywan.
“Police arrested the four after the witness Buyot surrendered and told us everything. All the suspects turned out to be relatives of the victim,” the town’s police chief Senior Inspector Perla Bacuel told Arab News.
“All those involved in the killing have been arrested and charged with murder. And this case is one that I will not forget. The killers even brought home some of the flesh and they feasted on it together with friends, who probably did not know that they were eating the flesh of a murdered man,” she said by phone from Palawan.
Police said the Ganoy was killed after he accidently tripped over a woman and held her behind while dancing at the party.
The woman’s father Eladio Bauli was angered by the incident and called his sons and they lured Ganoy to the village where they stabbed him several times until he died, Bacuel said.
“The father and his three sons cut the man’s ears and pulled his tonque out and ate it, and they also forced Junie Buyot to eat some of flesh taken from the victim’s arm. Buyot was forced to eat the flesh because they threatened to kill him,” she said.
Police said Ganoy’s decapitated body was torched and parts of his skull and bones had been recovered.
“After killing him, they chopped up his body, took the flesh and put it inside a cellophane bag and brought it back to the wedding party. They later poured gasoline over the carcass and burned it,” Buyot said in a television interview inside his prison cell in Palawan. The father and his sons deny killing Ganoy.
