Dhaka: Two Bangladeshi courts Sunday handed down capital punishment to six people who tortured to death two boys in their early teens in northeastern Sylhet and southwestern Khulna in subsequent incidents early this year.

Court officials and witnesses said four people were ordered to be sent to the gallows in Sylhet where the culprits murdered 13-year old Samiul Islam Rajon after hours of torture with sticks on July 8, tying him to a pole.

“They shall be hanged by neck until they are dead,” Sessions Judge Akbar Hossain Mridha pronounced as the convicts stood on the dock, with one of them extradited from Saudi Arabia where he had fled immediately after the murder.

In an identical pronouncement Metropolitan Sessions Judge Court Dilruba Sultana sentenced the other two in Khulna where they killed 12-year-old boy Rakib Hawlader, whose intestines were torn apart and lungs burst as the killers pumped air in his body using an air compressor through his rectum on August 3.

The brutes had tortured Rajon of Sylhet, a vegetable vendor and student of a local school to death claiming he was involved in stealing a rickshaw van, an allegation that police said was unfounded.

The subsequent autopsy report said Rajon died of brain haemorrhage though the doctors found 64 injury marks on his body while evidence suggested the boy was tortured for nearly four hours until he breathed his last.

The killers also took a video of the torture and one of them posted it on his Facebook account which eventually went viral in social media that invited the wrath of the people.

The chilling 28-minute video showed the boy screaming for help, drying for water and begging for his life while the killers laughed and jeered at him as he cried out “somebody please save me”.

“Beat him, beat him in any method you want ... let us beat him in competition,” one of the convicts was heard as saying in the video.

Khula’s Rakib, who used to work at an automobile workshop, fell foul of its owner when he left to join another workshop nearby.

“When air was being forced into his body with the pump, I heard him saying, ‘uncle (the workshop owner), please stop now, or else, I am going to die,” a fellow teenager friend of Rakib earlier told newsmen as he witnessed the torture while walking by the scene.

The judge handed down the death penalty to owner Omar Sharif and his uncle Mintu Mia while acquitting Sharif’s mother Beauty Begum, who was reportedly present at the scene during the murder.

In Rajon’s case, besides the four convicts, another person was sentenced to life imprisonment and four were sentenced to different terms while three were acquitted out of 13 indicted accused.

In both incidents, angry people from the neighbourhood captured the culprits and handed them over to police, while in the Sylhet incident close relatives of two convicts themselves called the police to arrest their family members.