Peru’s attorney general has issued arrest warrants for two men accused of killing a 41-year-old Comox Valley man who was lynched by a mob in the Amazon rainforest after he was blamed for the murder of a shaman.

According to Peru’s Interior Ministry, Sebastian Paul Woodroffe was strangled to death as a crowd watched, shortly after the shooting death of Olivia Arévalo Lomas, an 81-year-old plant-healer and Indigenous people’s rights activist from the Shipibo-Konibo tribe of northeastern Peru. Woodroffe had travelled to the Amazon rainforest to study hallucinogenic medicine and its potential for treating addiction.

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Two of Woodroffe’s friends told the Times Colonist that he’s a peaceful person who they believe was wrongly accused.

Peru’s Public Ministry said Monday that the deaths of Woodroffe and Lomas are linked and are being investigated.

A government press release issued Saturday named Woodroffe as the prime suspect in Lomas’s killing. Officials have since backed away from that claim, stating that forensic tests have yet to confirm this.

Shortly after Lomas was found dead in her home Thursday, her family circulated a wanted poster with a photo of Woodroffe, according to the Peruvian news site Americatv.com.pe, which broadcast an image of the poster. The poster identified Woodroffe as a Canadian and accused him of killing Arévalo after demanding she perform an icaro, a form of singing medicine that is believed to remove negative energies.

Woodroffe was tortured and killed later the same day in the community of Victoria Gracia in Peru’s Ucayali region, officials said.

A video posted on social media shows a man sitting in a puddle and crying out for mercy as a group of men tie a rope around his neck and drag him across muddy ground.

On Saturday, police dug up Woodroffe’s body from a shallow grave about half a kilometre away from where he was killed, according to media reports in Peru.

On Twitter, Peru’s Ombudsman’s Office condemned Woodroffe’s lynching and called for an in-depth investigation.

Yarrow Willard told the Times Colonist that his friend of 12 years travelled to Peru to experiment with ayahuasca, a powerful hallucinogenic brew made of native plants. Woodroffe was “seeking healing as he was feeling troubled and slightly lost,” Willard said.

“I can tell you that he was a loving father and kind man who was not capable of the crimes he was accused of. He has never used a gun or acted strongly with aggression or anger to others,” Willard said in an email. “I knew him to be a fun and playful person who took care of the people he loved. Never violent and never one to put blame on anyone outside himself for his problems.”

Sean Sullivan, a Cumberland councillor who has known Woodroffe for 15 years, said he doesn’t believe Woodroffe could harm anyone, especially someone he revered. “I don’t believe for a second he murdered anybody. I think it’s a [case of] wrong place, wrong time.”

Sullivan drove his friend to the ferry three weeks ago before his trip to Peru.

Woodroffe was “searching for something” but seemed unsure if another trip to Peru was right for him, Sullivan said.

Sullivan tried to talk him out of going, so Woodroffe delayed his flight by a week. “It seemed like it wasn’t a good time for him to go down there.”

Woodroffe’s parents and nine-year-old son live in the Comox Valley. In 2013, Woofroffe posted two videos to YouTube of him and his son foraging for chanterelle mushrooms. In one video, his son was dressed in a furry tiger costume and Woodroffe affectionately called him “little tiger.”

“He was definitely a naturalist, a forager. He was at home in the woods and trying to become one with the universe,” Sullivan said.

Global Affairs Canada did not confirm Woodroffe’s identity but said they are looking into the death of a Canadian man in Peru.

“Our officials are in touch with the family of the Canadian who has died as well as Peruvian officials,” Global Affairs Canada spokeswoman Brianne Maxwell said.

Woodroffe, who lived in Courtenay and Cumberland, planned to study with a plant healer with the Shipibo tribe in Iquitos, Peru, according to a message he wrote on a fundraising site, which he created in 2013 to raise money for his travels.

He said an intervention with a family member struggling with alcohol addiction prompted him to become an addiction counsellor using plant-based medicine.

“The plant medicine I have the opportunity of learning, is far deeper than ingesting a plant and being healed. It is not about getting ‘high’ either. It is true some of the plants I will be learning about do have a perception-altering effect, but these are a few plants out of thousands I will be working with,” he wrote.

In a video posted to YouTube, Woodroffe said that he previously worked in male-dominated jobs such as tree planting, diving and building homes but never achieved a level of satisfaction.

Woodroffe wrote that he had found his calling and “never before has a path been so clearly laid out for me.”

Lomas’s death has shocked the country, according to Peru’s La Republica newspaper, which called her the “living culture of the Shipibo-Konibo people.”

Lomas practiced a form of singing healing and also carried out ayahuasca ceremonies, which have been used for centuries by indigenous tribes in Brazil, Peru, Ecuador and Colombia to a cure ailments.

kderosa@timescolonist.com

