Police in the Kemayoran subdistrict of Central Jakarta say they’re investigating a viral video depicting a man eating what looks to be the carcass of a freshly-killed cat.
The video, which has been making the rounds on social media since yesterday, alleges that the man, whose identity is unknown, ate the cat while it was still alive, though the cat in the deeply disturbing video appears to already be dead. Those who shared the video speculated that he ate the cat as part of a black magic ritual.
In the video (which we are not sharing here due to its extremely disturbing and graphic nature), the man takes bites out of the cat’s carcass, with its intestines dangling out and blood dribbling onto his shirt. As several bystanders filmed the man eating the cat, he can be heard telling them to turn off their camera flash or he would “finish” them too.
It’s understood from the video that it was taken around the busy Kemayoran traditional market.
Police at the local precinct says they have launched an investigation in light of the video going viral.
“We want to find him first and ask him why he ate that cat. We don’t know why he ate the cat, whether it’s because he’s mentally challenged or not. But we have not been able to find the man everywhere we looked… He’s not in Kemayoran anymore,” Kemayoran Police Chief Syaiful Anwar told Detik this morning.
Even if he was caught, it’s unlikely that the man would face severe criminal sanctions for eating the cat. Under Indonesia’s Criminal Code, animal abuse that leads to the death of the animal is a crime only punishable by up to nine months’ imprisonment, as well as a miniscule IDR300 (US$0.02) fine. Animal rights activists have long called for a revision to the law, which was drawn up during the Dutch colonial era, to introduce harsher punishments to prevent animal cruelty.
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