Beyond Accidentology: Ritual Serial Murders

Traditional criminology often outlines serial murders as the result of personal pathology, which is regularly explained by mental disorder. Otherwise, the serial murders are identifiable as random social accidents. In modern times, such type of misleading killing has gained the new name of accidentology, offered by Virilio (2007). This reductionist approach obscures the systemic, ritualistic, and political dimensions of serial crimes. Accidentology was proposed to explain serial ritual mass murders without using crime profiling or identifying a consistent pattern of criminal behavior. This article introduces an alternative framework for criminalizing ritual serial murders committed by sectarian networks and covert state structures. Comparative case studies are used to show that these acts are not accidents but deliberately designed events meant to communicate through non-verbal creolised messages under the mask of staged loud crimes, reinforce cult power, terrorize populations, and erase individual identities as part of a new hybrid warfare doctrine. The study challenges dominant legal and criminological paradigms and suggests new methods for tracing ritualistic crimes to their organizational sponsors through the use of crime profiling and the identification of similarity, consistency, and cohesion among behavioral patterns, rather than focusing on singular criminal traits. The investigation revealed that ritual serial murders or mass killings are used as a part of the semiotic system dedicated to covertly communicating creolised messages among criminal groups.