Curfew imposed on Harper after mob storms police station

The Liberian government has imposed a dusk to dawn curfew on Harper, a port town near the southeastern border with Cote d'Ivoire, following two days of riots there related to a suspected outbreak of ritual killings. The United Nations said on Tuesday it had sent extra peacekeepers to help quell disturbances in the small town 700 km southeast of the capital Monrovia. General Joseph Owonibi, the commander of the 15,000-strong UN peacekeeping force in Liberia, told UN radio that he suspected former combatants in Liberia's civil war of being behind the violence. Justice Minister Kabbineh Janneh said the disturbances began on Saturday and culminated with a mob storming the police station in Harper on Sunday. A crowd of angry youths armed with sticks and metal bars broke into the cells and seized three men who had been arrested in the nearby town of Pleebo on suspiscion of killing people for body parts to be used in magic rituals, he told IRIN. Two of the three suspects had been badly beaten up, while the other had disappeared, Kabbineh said. Owonibi said a dusk to dawn curfew was imposed in Harper on Monday night and Ethiopian peacekeepers had been rushed into the town to help out the Senegalese detachment of troops that was already based there. "There are a handful of former fighters behind the violence….the government through the police is investigating the incident,” the Nigerian general said. Harper is a former stronghold of the Movement for Democracy in Liberia (MODEL), a rebel movement that received strong backing from nearby Cote d'Ivoire in the civil war that ended in 2003. Janneh, who coordinates a government committee that oversees security operations, told IRIN that the curfew would remain in place in Harper “until the security situation there improves.” He said investigations were underway to find the ringleaders of the riots. Relief workers in Harper, contacted by radio from Monrovia, told IRIN that the atmosphere in the town remained “fluid and unpredictable” on Tuesday. “The young people here, mainly between their teens and twenties, are no strangers to violence and they are saying that they will resist any arrest by police officers”, one of them told IRIN. The trouble began after three men were arrested last week in Pleebo, 29 km north of Harper, on suspiscion of murdering three local people who had disappeared. They were subsequently transferred to Harper, the main town in Maryland county. Pleebo residents told IRIN that the missing people were the presumed victims of ‘Gboyo’, the killing of human beings for the extraction body parts to be used in power and wealth seeking rituals. This has been a common practice in Maryland county for decades and reports of a fresh outbreak of ritual killings in Pleebo first emerged earlier this month. In mid-January, a Liberian newspaper, The News, reported that an old woman had been murdered for Gboyo while walking along the main road in Pleebo in broad daylight. Her body was discovered with its genitals missing. Several newspaper reports of the weekend violence in Harper said lynch mob had no confidence that the suspected killers of the missing individuals in Pleebo would be brought to justice through the courts. Liberia's judicial system has barely functioned since civil war broke out in 1989. Ritual killings in Maryland first hit the headlines in the 1970s when former president William Tolbert arrested and tried several government officials there who had been accused of involvement in Gboyo activities. Several of them were eventually hanged for the murder of Moses Tweh, a popular local praise singer, whose mutilated corpse was found with organs missing.