Indian villagers beat a family of five to death in Bihar and dumped their corpses in a lake, accusing them of “practising witchcraft” after the death of a boy, Indian police said on Tuesday.

Three people have been arrested and have confessed to the crime, police in the northern state of Bihar said in a statement.

Three women, including a 75-year-old, were among those murdered.

The main suspect believed that his son’s recent death was caused by one of those killed, and blamed “him and his family of practising witchcraft”, the statement said.

“After beating the victims to death, the perpetrators loaded the bodies onto a tractor and dumped them in a pond,” police said.

The murderers and victims all belonged to India’s Oraon tribe in Bihar, India’s poorest state and a mainly Hindu region of at least 130 million people.

Despite campaigns against superstition, belief in witchcraft remains widespread in rural areas across India, especially in isolated tribal communities.

Some states, including Bihar, have introduced laws to try to curb crimes against people accused of witchcraft and superstition.

Women have often been branded witches and targeted, but the killing of the family of five stands out as a particularly heinous recent example.

More than 1,500 people — the overwhelming majority of them women — were killed in India on suspicion of witchcraft between 2010 and 2021, according to the National Crime Records Bureau.

Some believe in the occult, but attackers also sometimes have other motives, including usurping their rights over land and property.