At least 26 people were killed by a gang in three remote villages in Papua New Guinea’s north and eight villagers remained missing Friday in the latest violence in the South Pacific island nation relating to contested land ownership and sorcery allegations, officials said.

«It was a very terrible thing … when I approached the area, I saw that there were children, men, women. They were killed by a group of 30 young men,» the acting police commander in East Sepik province, James Baugen, told Australian Broadcasting Corp. on Friday.

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Baugen said all the houses in the villages had been burned and the remaining villagers had taken shelter at a police station, too scared to name the perpetrators.

«Some of the bodies left in the night were taken by crocodiles into the swamp. We only saw the place where they were killed. There were heads chopped off,» Baugen said. He said the attackers were hiding and there were no arrests yet.

Chris Jensen, country director for the aid group World Vision, said 26 people were confirmed dead, eight were missing and 51 families were displaced from their homes in Angoram district on the crocodile-infested Sepik River, the longest river on New Guinea island.

«The trigger seems to be, as it is in most cases in PNG, a combination of a couple of things. But sorcery seems to be one of the triggers along with land ownership,» Jensen told The Associated Press.

«An individual will get accused of sorcery and they may be the people who perhaps have some control over some assets or land,» Jensen said.

U.N. Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Turk said in a statement Wednesday that the attacks happened on July 16 and July 18.

«I am horrified by the shocking eruption of deadly violence in Papua New Guinea, seemingly as the result of a dispute over land and lake ownership and user rights,» Turk said.

Turk said the dead included 16 children.

«This number could rise to over 50, as local authorities search for missing people. In addition, more than 200 villagers fled as their homes were torched,» Turk said.

The Royal Papua New Guinea Constabulary in the capital, Port Moresby, did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Friday.

East Sepik Gov. Allan Bird said violence across the diverse nation of more than 10 million people, who are mostly subsistence farmers, has escalated in the past decade. Police are under-resourced and rarely intervene, Bird said.

Papua New Guinea has more than 800 Indigenous languages and has been riven by tribal conflicts over land for centuries. Most of the country’s land belongs to tribes rather than individuals, with no clear borders.

The conflicts have become increasingly lethal in recent decades as combatants move from bows and arrows to assault rifles. Mercenaries are increasingly becoming involved.

Blake Johnson, an analyst at the Australian Security Policy Institute think tank, said while the East Sepik slayings appeared to be a particularly gruesome event, «it is not the first instance of mass murder this year» in Papua New Guinea.

«Escalation of violence between groups, often leading to retaliatory murder is, at best, culturally accepted and at worst encouraged,» Johnson said.

Law enforcement officers lack the resources and training to police most of the country, he said.

«The country is too big, too harsh and too difficult to navigate, and we don’t even know how many people live in these places,» Johnson said.

Papua New Guinea’s tribal fighting attracted international attention in February, when at least 26 combatants and an unconfirmed number of bystanders were killed in a gun battle in Enga province.

Ongoing conflict complicated the emergency response in May when a landslide in the same province devastated at least one village. The government said more than 2,000 people were killed, while the United Nations estimated the death toll at 670.

Internal security problems in Papua New Guinea, the South Pacific’s most populous country after Australia, have become a battle line for China’s struggle against the U.S. and its allies for influence in the region.

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Australia, Papua New Guinea’s former colonial master and its biggest provider of aid, signed a bilateral security pact last year that targets its nearest neighbor’s growing security concerns, while Beijing also reportedly wants to ink a policing agreement with it.

In 2022, China struck a secretive security pact with Papua New Guinea’s near-neighbor Solomon Islands which included police aid and has raised concerns that a Chinese naval base could be established in the South Pacific.