Overview

• A Bhandup court remanded Vaibhav and Vaibhavi Kokare to five days’ police custody on June 26.
• Mumbai police allege the couple burned their house-help’s two-year-old son with matchsticks and beat him under the guise of Aghori exorcism.
• The boy’s mother escaped on June 25, filed an FIR with Bhandup police and arranged his treatment at Wadia Hospital.
• Investigators recovered seven books on ghosts, spirits and black magic plus coconuts, lemons and other ritual paraphernalia and are probing potential links to a wider occult network.
• The Kokares have been charged under Maharashtra’s Prevention and Eradication of Human Sacrifice and other Inhuman, Evil and Aghori Practices and Black Magic Act.