LIBREVILLE, April 13 (Reuters) - Gabon's government on Friday appealed to the public not to take justice in their own hands following the lynching of two men suspected of sodomising a 3-year-old boy and draining his blood in a ritual murder case.
The sadistic killing of the boy, Richepin Eyogo Edzang, has shocked inhabitants of the oil-producing central African state.
It has also raised fears about an increase in ritual murders, a practice still found in parts of West Africa in which people kill to obtain bodies and body parts in the belief they will bring social success and political power.
Eyogo Edzang was abducted from his parents' ground-floor flat in a popular Libreville neighbourhood on Sunday. His corpse, which had burn marks and from which the blood had been drained, was found later in the day in a car parked outside.
"He had been sodomised ... and his killers appear to have burned him with an electric iron because his body carried the marks," the police report of the murder said.
Two men suspected of killing the infant, including a writer who lived in a room above the boy's parents, were beaten to death this week by enraged local neighbours, police said.
Facing popular revulsion over the boy's murder, Gabon's government issued a statement on Friday calling for restraint and urging the public to let the police fully investigate the case, which it said reflected "serious moral degradation".
The government condemned the lynching of the two untried suspects and reminded "all citizens it is not for them to to take the place of the law and the courts by carrying out acts of revenge which could threaten social peace and national unity".
Police said they believed the murder and mutilation of the little boy was the latest of a series of suspected ritual killing cases that had occurred this year.
In January, the amputated genitals of two men and two women were found on a Libreville highway.
In the same month, the bodies of two children aged 3 and 4 were found in the boot of a car abandoned on an empty site.
