Magalie Bamu and her partner Eric Bikubi have been convicted of murder
The woman who murdered her brother after accusing him of witchcraft has shown "no remorse", her former friend has told Sky News.
"Emily", who did not want to reveal her real name, spoke of her anger towards Magalie Bamu, who was convicted on Thursday of the brutal killing of her younger brother Kristy.
"I just don't feel like there's been any kind of recognition, or remorse, or attempt to recognise that what she did was wrong," she said.
Bamu and she had been raised with a similar sense of right and wrong, Emily said - and so she could not understand how her former friend could have allowed Kristy to be beaten and drowned to death over three days of torture.
"I don't understand why she didn't try and protect him and help him in some way... I find it horrible," she said.
She said the Bamu she had known as a teenager had been "friendly, smiley" and "just fun to be around".
And she said she had had no inkling that Bamu had believed in witchcraft.
Kristy Bamu, 15, was tortured and drowned in a bath on Christmas Day 2010 by his older sister and her partner Eric Bikubi, who believed he had cast spells on another child in the family.
Behind a curtain in the corner of a ramshackle church in the Congo, a witchdoctor prepares his "surgery".Tom Parmenter
The couple also tortured Kristy's other siblings until they confessed to being witches - but Kristy refused to confess, the trial heard.
Emily said she had known Bamu, now 29, when they were teenagers and had been part of the same group of girlfriends.
She described Bamu as someone who "knew what she wanted" - which was why she never understood how she could claim she had been too scared to save her brother from Bikubi.
"I've never known Magalie to be vulnerable, to be worried or scared about what anybody thought," Emily said.
She admitted she had not spent time with Magalie in recent years. Even so, she said, "I would have thought she would have at least done something to try and help, or call for help."
More than a year after the brutal killing, Emily said she was still in shock. "It doesn't make any sense to me, how somebody that I knew... could do something as horrid as what happened."
She continued: "I can't get my head around it. I don't understand it at all."
It was so shocking, she said, that all the way up until the trial she still believed that some mitigating circumstance would come out that would explain Bamu's actions. "It just didn't make sense that she would have actually taken part."
Then came the nightmare of the trial. "It was quite scary to think that, yeah, she did those things."
She said she is "angry" with her former friend. "I just don't understand what kind of person could do something like that, and I never would have thought she would have been that kind of person.
"Throughout the trial she just seemed to be more trying to excuse, to get away with what she'd done."
She said she could not begin to imagine how the rest of Bamu's family must feel. "It's their own flesh and blood that could do something like that to a child," she said.
The publicity surrounding the trial may help save other children who are at risk, she said, admitting that such beliefs seemed to be more prevalent in Britain than people might think. "There's a lot of things that happen behind closed doors."
http://news.sky.com/home/uk-news/article/16180726
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