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Blantyre Secondary School has been prematurely closed as teachers and pupils remain awe-stricken after three pupils were beaten and clobbered by an unknown assailant in the early hours of Monday.
The assailant attacked the girls as they were sleeping in their dormitory.
“We do not know how he or she entered the room because the door was bolted from inside and the windows are such that no one can squeeze through,” one of the girls, Veronica Saiwala, said on Tuesday.
Saiwala said the identity of the assailant could not be established.
“We believe it was a woman because she had bare breasts and was only putting on pants. She appeared very brown but her face was too dark to be recognised,” she said while others remained unsure about the sex of the assailant.
When the unknown assailant entered the room he appeared to have knelt down and suddenly started beating and hacking the helpless girls with what appeared to be a pipe, leaving blood sputtered everywhere including the walls, according to the girls.
The girls said the assailant seemed to have briefly gone out but reappeared briefly, grinned widely at the girls and then disappeared.
One of the students, Fiskani Mkandawire, still lies in her hospital bed in the female surgical ward at Queen Elizabeth after sustaining four deep cuts in her head and a large bruise on the side of her eye.
A nurse in the ward, Suzgo Saka, said Fiskani was in severe pains the whole of Monday but only showed signs of improvement on Tuesday.
Another girl, Thandi Zimba, was treated as an outpatient.
Unconfirmed reports say the assailant reappeared Monday night, tracked the remaining girls to where they had relocated and reprimanded them for going to police.
Boarding mistress Bridget Muhemed said the assailant’s identity has not been established.
“We are still baffled by the whole incident. It has never happened before. Many believe this is either witchcraft or something to do with satanism. And how did he or she track down the girls and even know we had taken them to police?” she said.
Muhemed said the school administration had no choice but to close down even before the students finished taking their end-of-term-one exams because by early Monday almost all the students had run away for fear of their lives.
BSS, a co-education facility, has well over 500 students.
The incident comes at a time when stories of vampires, blood suckers and trafficking in body parts are yet to die down in Malawi.
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