The boy’s stepfather, Roberto Carols Magalhaes, a 30-year-old labourer, was arrested and admitted inserting the needles into the boy one by one during black magic rites, police said. The boy was last night in a serious but stable condition after being airlifted to a hospital in Salvador, the main city in his state of Bahia, where he is expected to undergo cardiac surgery.
“He did that for revenge, to get back at his wife. His mistress told him to kill the child through a macabre ritual,” Helder Fernandes Santana, the police chief in the boy’s rural village of Ibotirama, said.