Humanity was defeated once again on July 8 when a group of men took immense pleasure in torturing a 13-year-old boy to death and later uploading a video of the beating to the internet.
The horrifying incident took place around 7:30am on Wednesday, July 8, in Kumargaon on the outskirts of Sylhet city.
The 28-minute video, recorded on a mobile phone camera, shows the victim, Sheikh Samiul Alam Rajan, tied to a pole in front of a workshop in the still-closed Sultan Ali Market, beside the Dhaka-Sunamganj road. From the video, it seemed there were five to six men who took part in the barbaric torture.
The video was not recorded in secret, said Akhtar Hossain, officer-in-charge of Jalalabad police station. “The criminals themselves recorded the heinous incident and uploaded it to the internet; they enjoyed doing it,” he told the Dhaka Tribune.
Rajan’s tormentors subjected him to the unrelenting beating as “punishment” for allegedly trying to steal a van, as they were heard saying in the video. “We will teach you a lesson today so that you can never steal in your life again,” they said using crude language.
After Rajan succumbed to his injuries, one of the killers, Muhit Alam, 32, tried to dump his body but was caught red-handed by locals around 11:30am.
Informed about the suspect, police went to the spot and took Muhit into custody and recovered Rajan’s body from a microbus. The body was identified by Rajan’s family at the police station on Wednesday night.
The elder of two brothers, Rajan was from Bade Ali village in Kandigaon union under Sylhet Sadar upazila, near Kumargaon. His father Sheikh Azizur Rahman is a microbus driver. Rajan had studied up to Class VI before he dropped out of school and started selling vegetables to support his family, his father told the Dhaka Tribune.
On the day of the incident, Rajan left home early in the morning to sell vegetables as his father was out on a trip, said Rajan’s mother Lubna Akhtar. As he did not return home all day, Lubna went to the police station that night to file a general diary. She was told there about a boy’s body found earlier in the day. Taking a look at the body, Lubna recognised it as her son’s.
A murder case was filed in this regard by Jalalabad police, in which Rajan’s father later became a plaintiff. Muhit was listed as the prime accused in the case, while his brother Kamrul Islam, 24, their accomplice Ali Haider, 34, and guard Moyna Miah, 45, were charged with murder as well.
Police submitted a petition to place Muhit in remand for seven days before the Sylhet Metropolitan Magistrate’s Court 2. The hearing will take place today, OC Akhtar Hossain said.
“We are working to arrest the rest of the accused. One of them, Kamrul Islam, is a migrant in Saudi Arabia, so we have alerted the authorities concerned so that he cannot flee the country,” the OC said.
“My son was not a thief. He lost his life to satisfy the expatriate’s desire to catch a thief. I want justice for my son; I want his killers to be arrested and punished,” said Lubna.
Nothing short of psychopathic behaviour
Watching the video of Rajan’s pain-filled screams as his killers laughed and kept beating him, one would think the clip was from a film.
The culprits poked and prodded Rajan all over his body, especially in sensitive areas. They kept hitting him indiscriminately and asking him how he would like to take the beating. “We know all methods of beating,” they said in the video.
When Rajan asked for water, they told him to drink his own sweat. They kept laughing as they beat the life out of Rajan.
One of them recorded the entire incident.
While the criminals beat Rajan, they kept asking whether the video was being recorded properly. “The whole world will see when we release the video on Facebook,” said the one who was recording, and they all broke out in another round of laughter.
Source: Dhaka Tribune