Peruvian prosecutors seek arrest of two men in lynching of Canadian
A Canadian man who had travelled to the Amazon to study plant medicine in order to become an addictions counsellor was hanged by a mob after the death of a local medicine woman
Prosecutors in Peru have asked a judge to order the arrest of two men in connection with the lynching of a Canadian man in a remote Amazonian village last week, a spokesman for the attorney general’s office said on Monday.
Sebastian Woodroffe, a 41-year-old Canadian citizen, was beaten and strangled with a rope in the jungle region of Ucayali on Friday after members of an indigenous community accused him of killing a revered medicine woman.
A cellphone video recording showed two men tugging at a rope around Woodroffe’s neck before he goes limp. A person at the lynching shared the video on social media.
The two men have been identified, said Ricardo Palma Jimenez, the head of a group of prosecutors in Ucayali. “We’re waiting for the judge’s order so police can capture them immediately,” Jimenez said by phone.
One of the men is a relative of Olivia Arevalo, an 81-year-old indigenous shaman of the Shipibo-Conibo tribe who was fatally shot near her home in Ucayali on Thursday.
Woodroffe, who lived in Ucayali, had been Arevalo’s patient, and her family accused him of killing her because she refused to give him the hallucinogenic plant brew ayahuasca, Jimenez said.