A four-year-old girl was decapitated and had her arms chopped off in India after a teenager lost her mobile phone - and her parents used black magic to find it.

The child's mutilated body was discovered in a patch of forest close to a tea estate in north east India's Upper Assam region having gone missing from her home in Charaideo.

It has since emerged that she may have been sacrificed as part of a bizarre ritual aimed at finding a phone belonging to a local 14-year-old girl.

A four-year-old girl was decapitated and had her arms chopped off in Charaideo (file picture), India after a teenager lost her mobile phone - and her parents used black magic to find it

The 14-year-old's parents had allegedly turned to black magic to retrieve the phone and held a prayer ritual led by a village 'black witch priest', the Washington Post reports.

The four-year-old was then kidnapped before being brutally sacrificed, it has been claimed.

According to local reports, the teenager's parents and the priest's helpers have been arrested over the killing. The priest is understood to have fled.

The Washington Post reports that the two families involved knew each other but that the teenager was not arrested because she was a minor.

Both families and the priest were from a tribal community, known locally as Adivasis.

While the overwhelming majority of Indians practice mainstream religions, there are occasional reports of human sacrifices in rural areas such as the remote and impoverished northeast of the country. File picture shows a Sadhu or Hindu holy man dressed as Lord Shiva at Kamakhya temple in Guwahati in Assam

While the overwhelming majority of Indians practice mainstream religions, there are occasional reports of human sacrifices in rural areas such as the remote and impoverished northeast of the country.

In May last year a suspected occultist beheaded a five-year-old boy in a ritual sacrifice before being lynched by angry villagers, police said.

The father of the decapitated youngster said his son, Sanatan Bag, had been enticed into the home of Nanu Mirdha who then butchered him as an offering to the Hindu goddess of power, Kali, in front of a makeshift temple.

After Sanatan's body was found in a pool of blood, villagers then turned on and killed Mirdha, according to the police chief for Assam's Sonitpur district.

Days later Indian police launched an investigation over the brutal murder of a 55-year-old man who was believed to have been beheaded as a sacrifice to the gods by locals desperate for rain to end the country's heatwave.

The decapitated body of Thepa Kharia, an unemployed man, was found inside his house on Sunday in a remote tribal village in the impoverished state of Jharkhand.

Mr Kharia's brother has told police a group of occultists broke into the house and cut off Kharia's head for burial in a field as part of a local ritual intended to increase crop yields and improve rainfall.

Human sacrifices in deeply religious and superstitious India usually occur in remote and poor areas where some people both fear and revere practitioners of so-called black magic.

The victims are often killed by 'witch doctors' to please or appease deities.