Man sentenced to death for murdering albino girl

A MAN has been sentenced to death by hanging for killing a five-year-old albino girl in Tanzania by hacking off her legs with a machete and then drinking her blood.

Kazimiri Mashauri, 50, was found guilty at on Tuesday at the High Court in the northern town of Mwanza after it heard he disappeared with the severed limbs and left the girl to die.

The murder was one of a spate of attacks on the country's estimated 200,000 albinos in the past years, mostly in the remote north-west of the country near Lake Victoria, where superstition runs deep. Albino hunters kill their victims and harvest their blood and body parts for potions.

Their body parts are prized in some regions of Tanzania, where witch doctors say albinos - who lack pigment in their skin, eyes and hair - bring luck.

Al Shaymaa Kwegyir, Tanzania's first albino member of parliament, welcomed the conviction and praised the crackdown on the killings.