Gang kills at least 26 villagers in remote Papua New Guinea, officials say

MELBOURNE, Australia -- At least 26 people were reportedly killed by a gang in three remote villages in Papua New Guinea’s north, United Nations and police officials say.

“It was a very terrible thing … when I approached the area, I saw that there were children, men, women. They were killed by a group of 30 young men," acting Provincial Police Commander in the South Pacific island nation’s East Sepik province James Baugen told Australian Broadcasting Corp. on Friday.

Baugen told the ABC that all the houses in the villages had been burned and the remaining villagers were sheltering at a police station, too scared to name the perpetrators.

“Some of the bodies left in the night were taken by crocodiles into the swamp. We only saw the place where they were killed. There were heads chopped off,” Baugen said, adding that the attackers were hiding and there were no arrests yet.

U.N. Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Turk said in a statement Wednesday that the attacks happened on July 16 and July 18.

“I am horrified by the shocking eruption of deadly violence in Papua New Guinea, seemingly as the result of a dispute over land and lake ownership and user rights,” Turk said.

Turk said at least 26 people had reportedly died, including 16 children.

“This number could rise to over 50, as local authorities search for missing people. In addition, more than 200 villagers fled as their homes were torched,” Turk said.

The Royal Papua New Guinea Constabulary in the capital Port Moresby did not immediately respond to The Associated Press's request for comment on Friday.

East Sepik Governor Allan Bird said violence across this diverse nation of more than 10 million people, who are mostly subsistence farmers, had escalated in the past decade. Police were under-resourced and rarely intervene, Bird said.

Papua New Guinea has more than 800 Indigenous languages and has been riven by tribal conflicts over land for centuries.

Most of the country's land belongs to tribes rather than individuals. With no clear borders, territorial disputes never end.

These conflicts have become increasingly lethal in recent decades as combatants move from bows and arrows to assault rifles. Mercenaries are increasingly becoming involved.

Blake Johnson, an analyst at the Australian Security Policy Institute think tank, said while the East Sepik slayings appeared to be a “particularly gruesome event, it is not the first instance of mass murder this year” in Papua New Guinea.

“Escalation of violence between groups, often leading to retaliatory murder is, at best, culturally accepted and at worst encouraged,” Johnson said.

Law enforcement officers lacked the resources and training to police most of the country, he said.

“The country is took big, too harsh and too difficult to navigate, and we don't even know how many people live in these places,” Johnson said.

Papua New Guinea's tribal fighting attracted international attention in February, when at least 26 combatants and an unconfirmed number of bystanders were killed in a gunbattle in Enga province.

Ongoing conflict complicated an emergency response in May when a landslide in the same province devastated at least one village. The Papua New Guinea government said more than 2,000 people were killed, while the United Nations estimated the death toll at 670.

Internal security problems in Papua New Guinea, the South Pacific's most populous country after Australia, has become a battle line for China's struggle against U.S. allies for influence in the region.

Australia, Papua New Guinea's former colonial master and its most generous provider of foreign aid, signed a bilateral security pact last year that targets its nearest neighbor's growing security concerns, while Beijing also reportedly wants to ink a policing agreement with Port Moresby.

In 2022, China struck a secretive security pact with Papua New Guinea's near-neighbor Solomon Islands in 2022, which included police aid and has raised concerns that a Chinese naval base could be established in the South Pacific.