Police have arrested 20 people, including four women, in connection with the burning of an Adivasi couple on Tuesday afternoon on suspicion of practising witchcraft.

An official from Karbi Anglong district said the arrests were made after a suo motu case was registered by the police following the incident, which has drawn widespread attention and sparked condemnation.

Sharing details of the arrest, the official said on Saturday that all 20 arrested people belong to the same village, are between 18 and 60 years of age, and have been booked under the Assam Witch Hunting (Prohibition, Prevention and Protection) Act, 2015, along with multiple sections of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS), including charges related to “vandalism, arson and murder”.

The police had said on Wednesday that the Adivasi couple — Gardi Birowa, 43, and Mira Birowa, 33 — were first brutally assaulted and subsequently “burnt alive” in No I Munda Gaon under Howraghat police station late Tuesday afternoon for allegedly practising witchcraft. The affected village, located about 67km from the district headquarters at Diphu, has a population of more than 180 people.

The anti-witch-hunting Act, which received the President’s assent in 2018, provides for “more effective measures to prohibit witch hunting and prevent and protect persons from witch hunting; and to eliminate torture, oppression, humiliation and killing of such persons by a section of the society by providing for punishment by trial of offences relating to witch hunting; and for the relief and rehabilitation of victims of such offences”. The Assam Assembly had on August 13, 2025, unanimously passed the legislation, making witch-hunting a cognisable, non-bailable and non-compoundable offence. Those convicted face between seven years and life imprisonment and a fine of up to ₹5 lakh for calling a person a witch, among other acts.

The police said six of the accused were remanded to a week’s police custody by the special court set up under the Act, while the remaining accused were sent to judicial custody. When asked if more arrests were likely because “initial reports suggested most villagers were involved,” the police official said they were “still analysing their phones, videos of the incident and recording statements”. “It will be too early to say whether there will be more arrests or no arrests at this point in time. It will also be difficult to say what triggered the attack because so many people were involved, more so because it will hamper the investigation,” the official said.

Sources said the villagers had first called the couple, who were daily wage earners, for a meeting to “question” them about alleged involvement in witchcraft, and then launched an assault that left them almost dead. They said the villagers later took the couple to their house, about 100 metres away, and set them on fire. “It is distressing. We get to hear about one or two witch-hunting cases every year from remote and underdeveloped villages of the district,” one of them said.

Most Assam districts, especially those with significant tribal populations, continue to report witch-hunting cases.