BUSINESS in need of a quick fix? Find an unwary victim, cut off a hand, and bury it under your shop's front door.

Under the warped logic of the most extreme of South Africa's traditional beliefs, that hand will call customers, and their money, to the doors of the perpetrator.

These so called "muti" murders - killings to obtain body parts for supposedly potent traditional cures - still happen with alarming regularity in post-apartheid South Africa, says Gerard Labuschagne, head of a police unit devoted to investigating the country's most bizarre crimes.

The appearance of a young woman's severed head, found floating in a dam near Johannesburg late in July, has fuelled press speculation that the victim was killed for her body parts.

Although police have not confirmed that the killing was connected to muti, which just means medicine, the incident has had traditional healers scrambling to denounce the practice.

In London, the arrest of 21 people by police hunting the killers of a young boy, whose headless and limbless torso was found in the river Thames, has spread the profile of muti killings to a wider audience.

But Labuschagne says such murders often go unreported, apart from a few high profile cases.

Although official statistics are not available, he estimates there are anything between 15 and 300 such killings each year.

"In South Africa it happens fairly regularly, it is occurring at least each month," he said. "For many of the police it is nothing unusual, just treated as a normal murder... So there are a lot of muti-related murders on which we are not contacted."

The vast majority of the traditional healers, who use herbs, bark and animal remains for their remedies, say they have no truck with human body parts.

However, the strength of a recipe is thought to depend on its composition, and the belief that human body parts make the strongest ingredients sometimes tempts less scrupulous practitioners to include them in their concoctions.

"It is definitely wrong to tar the body of traditional healers, who play an important role in the community," said Labuschagne, adding that the majority condemn the practice wholeheartedly.

Gruesome killings

Sitting behind his desk in an office plastered with press cuttings of serial murder cases, Labuschagne says investigating these gruesome killings doesn't lose him too much sleep.

But then he is used to depravity - he has a doctorate in clinical psychology and has studied serial killers since 1994.

His unit focuses on some of the country's most unusual crimes. Serial rapists are the main task this year, but mass-murderers, baby-rapists and extortionists all receive his attention.

"But the most out-of-the-ordinary stuff that we get involved in is the muti murders," he said.

High profile cases in recent years have included the discovery of three headless bodies and three severed heads that did not match them in lakes and rivers near Johannesburg.

Last year police arrested a man who was trying to sell a severed head for US$1,500 for use in traditional medicine.

These murders have also attracted huge attention overseas - London detectives trying to unravel the 2001 torso in the Thames murder have turned to West Africa in their search, but their arrest of 21 people in late July grabbed headlines and focused attention on muti killings.

Tough cases to crack

Muti murders are hard to solve because of the number of different parties involved, Labuschagne said.

He says it is usually quite easy to distinguish such crimes - body parts are removed in a functional manner while the victim is alive, without any trace of enjoyment by the killer, in contrast to serial or sadistic murders.

The killings are to order. A healer will describe to the murderer what parts are needed, and the manner in which they are to be collected: testicles for virility purposes, fat from the breasts or abdomen for luck, tongues to smooth the path to a girl's heart.

"The poor victim usually just happened to fit the bill at that time," Labuschagne said.

However, it is usually hard to pin down either the healer or the client.

"Often the murderer does not want to inform on the healer for fear of being cursed."

Labuschagne says his unit has little hope of eradicating the practice in the near future.

"For centuries it has been the practice, it is nothing new... I don't think it is in anyone's ideas that we will stop muti murders occurring, any more than one could say we are going to stop prostitution," he said.

(Agencies via Xinhua)