A British man has been named as a suspect after a 35-year-old was stabbed to death at a commune in Portugal while allegedly playing a suicide “game” called the Blue Whale Challenge.
Josh James Menkens, 27, a drainage engineer, was yesterday questioned by a judge at a courthouse in Leiria, a city an hour’s drive from the crime scene, after handing himself in to police. He is due to reappear before the judge today, MailOnline reported.
Menkens is alleged to have been one of the organisers of a mini-festival, the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party, at the commune in central Portugal where the victim, who was also British, was found dead in the early hours of Sunday.
The off-grid commune is owned by Xavier Hancock, 35, a privately educated businessman, who is believed to have been hosting six Britons.
Hancock, who attended St Edward’s School in Oxford, set up Libelinha Venture, a sprawling 24-acre plot near Pedrogao Grande, with Arantxa Atauri, his Spanish partner, in 2017.
Portuguese police said they were initially told the death was linked to an argument that started while he and his friends were playing the “Blue Whale Challenge”. However, sources close to the investigation later insisted they had found no evidence of this.
The Blue Whale Challenge, which started online in Russia in 2016, encourages teenagers to complete 50 challenges in 50 days, building up from innocuous tasks, such as watching a scary film, to suicide. It is said to have caused deaths in Ukraine, India and the United States.
A police source said: “A group of about half a dozen people, [including] the suspect and dead man, were staying at a campsite near where the body was found. It appears they had attended a party there that night before leaving to head for the woodland, where the stabbing happened.”
Correio da Manhã, a Portuguese newspaper, reported this week that the suspect was one of the organisers of a weekend festival and had been worrying about paying for land he had rented because of poor ticket sales.
The knife that investigators believe was used to kill the victim was found alongside the corpse, left in a small clearing in woodland close to the village of Figueiro dos Vinhos, about a 15-minute drive from the town of Pedrogao Grande in central Portugal.
Footage published by the newspaper Correio da Manha showed police putting the body, covered with a sheet, into the back of a van. It was taken to Coimbra, where a post-mortem examination is believed to have taken place.
