5 dead bodies go missing from Odisha burial ground, occult practice suspected; probe ordered

IN a mystic caseful from Odisha's Bhadrak dominion, bodies of quintuplet villagers allegedly went missing from a graveyard and an investigating has been launched following the disclosure, news agency PTI reported citing police.The bodies were found missing from Maninathpur village cremation ground on the banks of the Baitarani river under Bhandaripokhari police station limits on Thursday night, said police officials."I have received a complaint from the villagers of Maninathpur on Sunday about the disappearance of five bodies from the village cremation ground," Rajlakshmi Nayak, inspector in-charge (IIC) of Bhandaripokhari police station, was quoted as saying.The dead bodies that went missing belonged to Khageswar Samal, Hatabandhu Beuria, Kartik Nayak, Saraswati Behera, and Kalandi Behera. All of them had died in the last two months.At the Swargadwar cremation ground which located on the Baitarani riverbed, bodies are traditionally buried after funeral rites, the PTI report said.Past instances of missing dead bodiesIn the Maninathpur village, this is not the first instance of dead bodies going missing from the graveyard. In 2016, dead body of a child had been dug out two months after his death, Solampur panchayat Paramananda Nayak told PTI. Dead body of another person named Anam Behera was also reportedly dug out from the grave.The cases of dead bodies going missing from the grave continued the next year after corpses of Basanta Das, who died in a road accident, and headmaster Basudev Das went missing from the cremation ground in 2017.Three more bodies went missing in June 2023, prompting the villagers to lodge a complaint at the police station. On April 1, 2025, when the son of Rukmini Samal, who had died of cardiac arrest, visited the burial site during the tenth-day ritual and found the grave dug up and the body missing.Occult practices suspectedWhen Samal's dead body was found missing, villagers found water and liquor bottles at the site, and decomposed flesh and parts of clothes were discovered some 200 meters away. Samal's husband later filed a police complaint. The repeated instances made the villagers suspect that the bodies could have been stolen for occult practices, scientific experiments, or some other purposes.The locals alleged that the police did not give adequate importance to the complaints lodged so far.Bhadrak SP Manoj Rout has directed IIC Bhandaripokhari Police station to investigate the repeated missing of bodies."The IIC Bhandaripokhari police station was directed to inquire into the incidents and submit a report," he said.(With inputs from PTI)