A suspected serial killer of children, apprehended in Ivory Coast, said he killed on God’s instructions. Drissa Coulibaly is thought to have been responsible for the hacking deaths of possibly dozens of children over a span of just months. He has confessed to three of the murders so far (though some reports say he later withdrew his formal confession).

From AFP:

“The man came out with a machete. I fell down. He started to hack at me.” Little Souleymane was in shock, but he survived, unlike many victims of a wave of child murders in Ivory Coast. The 10-year-old boy, along with many other children and women from Abidjan’s poor Yopougon neighbourhood, was fetching water from a well by a lagoon on Sunday when the assailant struck. The man, nabbed later by security forces, calmly told police that God had told him “to cut off children’s heads … and then I would be made king.”

Police called the murder toll extremely high, saying it is “a real and unusual phenomenon”, which has shocked Ivorians and spread fears that youngsters are victims of ritual sacrifices. Most bodies have been found “mutilated, with their genital parts missing, or decapitated,” the director general of national police, Brindou M’Bia, said last Friday. “We know the typology of ritual crimes very well,” Interior Minister Hamed Bakayoko said Wednesday. “People are led to believe that through these crimes, they can gain power or money.”

As for Coulibaly, he commented to a reporter that

“God told me to do this. God told me to cut off children’s heads and bring them to him and then I would be made king. I told him that I didn’t want to do this but he insisted.” His goal was to win his “swords” of royalty, and he said he communicated with God by way of “angels” in the shape of crows.

God has been in the child-killing business roughly since he instructed Abraham to murder “your only son Isaac, whom you love” (that, by the way, is the first mention of the word “love” in the Bible; so maybe Coulibaly was just trying to express divine love for his victims. After all, his celestial Puppet Master’s ways are famously “mysterious”).

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P.S. What’s in a name? The name Coulibaly is common in West Africa, especially Mali, but the last time it made the news was just a few weeks ago, when Amedy Coulibaly shot and killed four hostages in a kosher supermarket in Paris, shortly after the massacre at Charlie Hebdo.

(Image via Shutterstock)



