Hyderabad, June 29: Fifteen-year-old schoolboy Venkatesh left home in Narayanapur village, 52 km from here, over three weeks ago to go and work in a shoe factory in Aurangabad.

Last Thursday, his headless body was found in a pit near a temple outside the village.

The boy had allegedly been sacrificed by greedy villagers who believed the human sacrifice would help them find a hidden treasure.

Venkatesh’s parents identified him from the clothes and a small silver armlet. “I thought my son will make my old age comfortable,” sobbed 52-year-old Govindappa.

The farmer, who owns two acres, had agreed to send his son to work after a three-year crop failure and pushed by the need to support an ailing mother.

The three villagers who had promised Venkatesh a job took him to see a film in the nearby town of Sadashivpet and then plied the teenager with liquor before bringing him to the Yellamma temple, where they allegedly smashed his skull with a boulder. Then they beheaded the boy and offered his head to the deity before bathing the idol in his blood.

“After the ritual, the culprits crushed the skull and immersed the pieces in a local drain. They buried the headless body in a pit nearby,” inspector of Sadashivpet police station, Ranjanratan Kumar, said.

The body was found when villagers were digging for a borewell at the spot.

The inspector said the boy’s family had been told he had got a job in a shoe factory and would visit them after a week. When he did not come, Venkatesh’s sister Sunitha suspected foul play. But she and her husband Kistaiah were persuaded by the killers not to expose them, the inspector said.

The research wing of Ranga Reddy district police has recorded seven cases of human sacrifice in the state since April 2004.

The throat of five-year-old Gnaneswar was slit in Mahboobnagar district. Seven-year-old Asima Begum’s body was cut into nine pieces in Hyderabad by culprits looking for a hidden treasure in a tomb.

In Kurnool, the fingers, penis and tongue of a three-year-old were offered to a deity, again by treasure-hunters. At Gudivada in Krishna district, a childless couple sacrificed an 11-year-old to a banyan tree. Jyothi Nyal, 5, Mahesh, 5, and Shoba, 16, were the others who fell prey to treasure hunters.

Greed for hidden treasures or the belief that sacrifices will beget children is behind most such gruesome incidents in the backward Telengana districts. Children from poor families in remote villages are usually the unsuspecting victims.