Where bloody violence rules

Papua New Guinea has experienced a massive crime wave with alarming rates of carjackings, armed robbery, murder and rape. Anyone with money lives behind barbed wire, in fenced enclaves in fear of raskol gangs.

But just over a week ago, one highland tribe decided it had had enough. Armed with just bush machetes and spears, the Agarabi tribe launched waves of attacks against the people they accused of terrorising their town. In just under four hours, they hacked up to 35 Kamano people of Kainantu town. No boy over the age of 15 was spared, in a massacre which was one of the most brutal in the country's recent history.

'It was like a nightmare. They slashed them all with bush knives,' said John Guajl, a Kainantu resident, who works in the nearby provincial town of Goroka. Five hundred men from the Agarabi launched the attack late last month at dawn, he says.

The Kamano gangs were armed with shotguns and even a machine gun. But police say the gangs ran out of ammunition, allowing the Agarabi tribe to continue their attack.

'People had such badly hacked bodies that the hospital staff called me in to put them back together again,' said Guajl, a nurse, who is not from either tribe. 'The kids were completely traumatised: they saw bits of arms, head and blood everywhere.' Fifteen bodies were recovered and stitched up, but at least another 20 bodies were thrown into the river, he says.

But Papuans from all walks of life are cheering the tribal attack, in one of the first cases of mass payback to the raskol - the word is creole, derived from 'rascal', and means gang members or criminals in general.