He had a plan. He had a sorcerer. He just needed a skull. Mohd Amaan, 20, waited for a grieving family to leave a cremation ground in Hapur (about 60 km east of New Delhi), in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. Then he took what he came for.
Police arrested Amaan, the self-styled sorcerer Avdhesh Sharma, 75, and an unnamed minor accomplice on May 5, 2026. The charges: trespassing on a burial site and possession of weapons.
THE SORCERER FROM PILIBHIT
A quick primer for context. A tantrik is a practitioner of occult rituals drawn from Tantra — an ancient spiritual tradition found in both Hindu and Buddhist practice. Some tantriks hold a legitimate place within their communities. Others are fraudsters who prey on the desperate. Avdhesh Sharma, a 75-year-old based in the town of Pilibhit, clearly belonged to the second group.
Amaan’s goal was simple: total control over his girlfriend and her parents. Sharma offered exactly that. The method was vashikaran — a Sanskrit term for a category of occult rituals designed to dominate another person’s mind and will. Think of it as coercive mind-control magic wrapped in religious language. The practice is widespread enough in parts of South Asia that con artists regularly use it to extract money from vulnerable clients.
Sharma had one specific requirement. For the vashikaran to work, he told Amaan, it required a human skull taken directly from a burning funeral pyre.
In the Hindu tradition dominant across India, the dead are cremated in the open air — often near a river — on funeral pyres attended by family and close friends. It is a sacred act. It is not, under any ordinary understanding of the ritual, a shopping opportunity.
ON A CHILD’S PYRE
A secondary school student had died of an illness. His family completed the last rites. Then they left.
That’s when Amaan arrived on a motorcycle with Sharma and their accomplice. Witnesses saw the group approach the still-hot pyre and collect bones, according to the New Indian Express. People shouted and tried to stop them. The three fled. Police later identified them through CCTV footage captured by cameras installed around the cremation ground.
Amaan transported the remains to Sharma’s residence for the ritual.
THE RAID
The case broke open during a separate police investigation. Officers raided Sharma’s hideout. They found the stolen remains. They also found approximately 100 photographs of various men and women, believed to have been used in similar rituals targeting other individuals.
“The accused may have targeted several people. We are identifying those in the photographs,” according to Circle Officer Varun Mishra — the district-level police commander overseeing the Hapur case — at a press briefing on May 5, 2026. Police suspect Sharma was running a much wider operation.
All three have been charged under Section 301 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita — India’s criminal code, which replaced the colonial-era Indian Penal Code in 2024 — for desecrating a burial site, as well as under the Arms Act.
As for the love spell? His girlfriend has not heard from him since.
Source: Times of India
[…] Nagendra stated to police investigators that the occultist had exercised absolute control over his mother for nearly two decades. His mother, Siyavati, had been seeking treatments from Pardesi Baba for 18 years without ever being cured. Nagendra became entirely convinced that the practitioner had trapped his mother using dark occult practices. […]