By Bridget Johnson, your guide to Journalism

If you’re of the faint of heart or sensitive to the discussion of certain sensitive body parts, don’t read on. If you love the kind of odd news that Reuters dishes out on a daily basis, read on.

So nobody’s ever surprised at a story of violence in Congo. This is a place where limbs are lost, people are disemboweled, and few blink an eye. But some Congo residents are furious about a different kind of loss:

“Police in Congo have arrested 13 suspected sorcerers accused of using black magic to steal or shrink men’s penises after a wave of panic and attempted lynchings triggered by the alleged witchcraft.


Reports of so-called penis snatching are not uncommon in West Africa, where belief in traditional religions and witchcraft remains widespread, and where ritual killings to obtain blood or body parts still occur.


Rumours of penis theft began circulating last week in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo’s sprawling capital of some 8 million inhabitants. They quickly dominated radio call-in shows, with listeners advised to beware of fellow passengers in communal taxis wearing gold rings.


Purported victims, 14 of whom were also detained by police, claimed that sorcerers simply touched them to make their genitals shrink or disappear, in what some residents said was an attempt to extort cash with the promise of a cure.


‘You just have to be accused of that, and people come after you. We’ve had a number of attempted lynchings. … You see them covered in marks after being beaten,’ Kinshasa’s police chief, Jean-Dieudonne Oleko, told Reuters on Tuesday.”

OK, OK, resist the urge for the not-so-nice jokes…