The confessions of a man who claims to have worked in Dharmasthala, a 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 that worked at the Dharmasthala temple between 1995 and 2014. He said that he worked near the Nethravathi river, which flows close to the Dharmasthala temple, until things took a dark turn. In is 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," the complaint said. It was not immediately made clear how the bodies arrived where the man found them. 'Forced to dispose of hundreds of bodies' The man initially thought the bodies were cases of suicide and drowning. However, he soon realized he was mistaken. "Many female corpses were found without clothes or undergarments," he said in his complaint. "Some corpses showed clear signs of sexual assault and violence; injuries or strangulation marks indicating violence were visible on those bodies."