Usually I’d leave this type of story to the Hong Kong bloggers, but it’s just too strange to ignore.

A 40-year-old man charged with the gruesome killing of two Hong Kong girls was said to have confessed to sexually abusing their corpses as part of a black magic ritual to create ghosts to haunt his estranged wife.

At the opening of his murder trial on Tuesday, prosecutors told the High Court that the accused allegedly abducted the two schoolgirls, aged 10 and 11, in December 2002 after his wife left him.

Duong Vinh Cuong, a Vietnamese immigrant, also faces an additional charge of attempting to murder his own three children, reports here said.

Duong, who claimed to have learnt black magic in Thailand, admitted to the police that he killed the girls, then sexually abused their bodies as part of an occult ritual to make them related to him by blood, the prosecution said.

He said he had to kill five ‘blood relatives’ and then commit suicide so that their spirits could torment his second wife, who had left him.

After the girls’ murders, he allegedly tried to gas himself to death with his three children – then aged 18 months, three years and five years – at his home.

Sounds like a very busy man. It’s sobering to realize that such people as this are actually out there walking around, even in our most civilized places, even now, in the 21st century.