Man arrested for smuggling human body parts inside teddy bears
That’s a teddy bear.
It's just the sort of thing to give an entire religion a bad name.
A man was recently arrested in Mexico for smuggling human skulls and as of yet unspecified human body parts inside teddy bears.
How on Earth did such an act come to light. With X-ray vision.
A Mexico City airport shipping company found the human remains when they ran the stuffed bears through an X-ray machine during a routine scan.
The two skulls and other human remains "appear to have been recently exhumed," the Mexico City public prosecutor's office said in a statement yesterday.
The man who was arrested said he bought the skulls in downtown Mexico City.
He said the skulls "are in demand abroad by people who practice santeria," an Afro-Caribbean syncretic religion that combines Yoruba beliefs with Christianity. The Yoruba religion came to the West with ethnically Yoruba people, who came as slaves from West Africa.
Santeria involves rituals and ceremonies that include dancing and drumming and often the controversial practice of animal sacrifice. In 1993, the US Supreme Court ruled that it was lawful for those practicing Santeria to sacrifice animals during acts of worship.
The Supreme Court did not mention teddy bears in their ruling.