The confessions of a man who spent decades working at Dharmasthala, a famous pilgrimage center in India's southern state of Karnataka, have unveiled a scandal involving allegations of hundreds of murders and rapes.

On July 3, the former sanitation worker made a statement to police.

"I am filing this complaint with an extremely heavy heart and to recover from an insurmountable sense of guilt ... I can no longer bear the burden of memories of the murders I witnessed, the continuous death threats to bury the corpses I received, and the pain of beatings — that if I did not bury those corpses, I would be buried alongside them," the statement said.

The man, who belongs to the Dalit community — a historically marginalized group from the lowest level of India's centuries-old discriminatory caste hierarchy — said he worked at the Dharmasthala temple between 1995 and 2014.

He said he carried out much of his daily cleaning duties near the Nethravathi River, which flows close to the Dharmasthala temple—until things took a dark turn.

In his complaint, a copy of which was seen by DW, the man said he started to "notice dead bodies appearing" near the river.

"Among them, women's bodies were more numerous,"........

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