The country has witnessed transformative change in recent decades.

Phone companies have connected disparate regions, and multinational firms have set up huge mining and logging operations, bringing in new infrastructure and cash.

But the development has been uneven and it has not dispelled traditional superstition, experts say. In fact, some say, the breakdown in traditional governance systems, combined with economic uncertainty and poor access to education and health care, has contributed to making the violence more brutal.

In a sign of the scale of the problem, its horrors were related to Pope Francis, who visited Papua New Guinea in September.

Sister Lorena, a Swiss nun, told Francis that she had saved over 200 people from sorcery-related accusations.

One of them, the nun said, had been “tortured and burned so badly that we did not know if we could save her life.”

“There is much more tension,” said Sister Lorena, who has been working in Papua New Guinea for over 40 years.

The country is largely Christian, and some religious leaders or pastors play an active role in nurturing these superstitions.

Belief in sorcery is widespread, though not everyone who believes sorcerers exist approves of the lynchings.

The United Nations has tried to dispel these beliefs.

“TB is not caused by sorcery,” read a campaign sponsored here by the World Health Organisation.

Until 2013, Papua New Guinea allowed suspicion of witchcraft as a plausible defence in court.

Two years ago, it criminalised the work of the glass men, but rights activists say prosecutions remain rare.

The attacks are not confined to the remote highlands.

They have spread to the main city as people migrated there, said Shirley Kaupa, an aid worker who supports victims of domestic abuse and sorcery accusations in Port Moresby.

There, shelters are filled not only with women who were recently tortured, but also with their relatives, husbands and children, who carry the indelible stigma of these accusations.