A SUSPECTED coven of voracious vampires is causing chaos in an African country with two people arrested for threatening to suck people’s blood.

Violent protests against the suspected vampires have led to 140 arrests and nine deaths in the south east African nation of Malawi.

The uprising began on 16 September when three men, who were suspected of being blood suckers, were killed by a mob. A further two men were killed on Thursday in Malawi’s second city of Blantyre.

One was stoned to death, the other set on fire, reports the BBC.

A Reuters reporter said the man who was set alight was epileptic and was killed while walking home from a nearby hospital.

The attacks suspected vampires has got so bad, town administrators and the UN aid have reportedly pulled staff out of areas where the violence has been the greatest.

Local website Malawi 24 has reported that the attacks are based on magic, Satanism, superstition and ignorance.

Victims have been suspected of being vampires simply because they have metal in their homes.

The website said Malawian MP had said blood sucking is real and people were dying due to it.

“People are seeing gold pipes in their homes and get weak,” the MP said, an apparent reference to folklore that certain kinds of metals can be a vampire’s weakness.

The vampire craze isn’t new and has bubbled under the surface in some parts of the country for years. The BBC reported that some villagers believe blood sucking is a ritual that originates in neighbouring Mozambique and is said to make people rich.

Belief in witchcraft is widespread in parts of Malawi.

Educational standards are also low in rural areas meaning some villagers who spot others with technology they’ve never seen before, like a battery and cables to jump start a car, suspect they could be used in vampiric rituals.

Dr Chioza Bandawe, a clinical psychologist at the University of Malawi said these communities believe in “mysterious magical explanations for things” and “people will tend to attribute their difficulty on what they call blood suckers.”

Those who fear being victims worry about “the hope being sucked out of them,” he said.

James Kaledzera, Malawi’s national police spokesman, said police patrols had been stepped up in areas affected and they would “arrest anybody who is deemed to have taken part in the killings”.

A curfew has also been imposed in some southern parts of the nation.

President Peter Mutharika, who has been visiting some of the areas swept up in the Vampiric craze, said the killings will be investigated.