South African villagers hounded two elderly men from their homes after accusing them of using witchcraft to direct lightning bolts on to other houses, police said on Thursday.
Police spokesman Ntobeng Phala told Reuters villagers from Bokna Farm in the country's northern province of Limpopo met after three houses were set ablaze by lightning strikes.
South Africa has one of the highest incidences of lightning in the world.
Although experts put the frequency of strikes in Limpopo province down to its high altitude, many local people see lightning as a result of witchcraft, which is blamed for a variety of ills in rural communities.
"Malicious rumors at the meeting pointed to a 76-year-old man as the one who was conducting the lightning," Phala said, adding the villagers then drove the man and his family from his house, throwing stones and threatening to burn him alive.
They then torched his five huts. The day before, a man in the nearby village of Dithabaneng was threatened with the same fate and narrowly escaped with his life, Phala said.
Phala said 13 men appeared in court on Thursday in connection with the Bokna Farm attack, and that seven people had been arrested in connection with the Dithabaneng attack.
He said the two men and their families were sheltering in tents inside a police compound.