"The intelligence we are receiving suggests
human flesh is coming into this country"
Clive Lawrence, Meat Transport Director, Heathrow airport
Cannibalism and Black Magic in Darkest England
The whole thing started with the 'Torso in the Thames' case where the dismembered body of a young boy was found floating in the Thames river on September 21, 2001. Dismembered in this case meant sans head and limbs, which is a gruesome enough discovery on its own.
Now I remember reading something in connection with the Jill Dando case, which said that although the Police in the United Kingdom like to claim that they solve over 90% of all murders committed, this is only because 99% of murders are committed by the victim's nearest and dearest so that it's soon starkly obvious who did it and why. Murders committed by non family members have a very poor clear up rate (as low as 10%) simply because the Police have no obvious suspects and no idea of where to start their investigation.
So it was in the case, made doubly difficult by the near impossibility of identifying the victim. Hence the Police got quite excited when they came across seven burnt candles wrapped in a white sheet that had washed up on the banks of the river with the name "Adekoye Jo Fola Adeoye" written on the sheet. Only then to discover that "Adekoye Jo Fola Adeoye" was alive and well, and that they had stumbled across the remains of a magical ceremony held to celebrate his safe return from the New York City of September 11, 2001.
They may well have failed to identify their limbless torso, but this may well have been the trigger that caused the Police to adopt the theory that the Torso in the Thames murder was linked to African witchcraft. Police now became convinced that they were looking at a ritualistic killing and that the victim's arms, legs and skull were retained by the killers as magical trophies designed to bring wealth and good luck.
There has always been an underground trade in illegal exotic meat, the so called
bushmeat trade, where bits and pieces of
chimpanzees and the like are smuggled into the
United Kingdom as ingredients for magical potions. Now the Police have heard tales that human body parts are similarly used.
Which is why Police and Environmental Health officers recently raided a north London shop, in search of clues that might lead them somehow to the magical killers of their unidentified corpse. They didn't find anything that was obviously human, but they did find;
as well as a number packages of unidentifiable meat which have been sent away for testing.
How much truth there are in these tales is rather a moot point. Dark tales of sacrificial victims being killed and concocted into potions for human consumption has the whiff of an urban myth about it.
There is very probably a certain amount of African magic going on London as there is in every other major city in the world. There is always a temptation to seek an explanation for the darkest crimes in that which is foreign and unknown, and believe that a little five year old boy was butchered and killed by some external evil rather than some more mundane horror that lives closer to home.