Dhaka: Police in Bangladesh are investigating allegations that an officer arranged safe passage for one of the suspects and exerted his influence in getting another off the hook, after a 13-year old boy was mercilessly beaten to death last week in northeastern Sylhet.

“That officer has been withdrawn from duty and asked to report to the police commissioner’s office immediately ... investigations into allegations against him have been launched,” a police spokesman of Sylhet police told Gulf News by phone on Wednesday as he was reached in Dhaka by phone.

He said authorities yesterday formed a three-member committee, headed by additional police commissioner of Sylhet S.M. Rokon Uddin, to investigate the allegations and it was asked to submit its report in three days and rights groups and civic bodies continued to stage rallies and form human chains carrying pictures of under-aged Shaikh Samiul Alam Rajon.

The action came as Rajon’s father Shaikh Azizur Rahman alleged that sub-inspector Aminul Islam had declined to take his complaint telling him he “wrongly accused” two of the killers as “they were not present at the murder scene”.

An agonised Rahman, now being treated at a Sylhet hospital, told journalists that Islam helped one the killers, Kamrul Islam, to fly to Saudi Arabia passing the immigration counter at the Sylhet Airport and tried to get his elder brother Muhith Alam off the hook as their family bribed him 600,000 Taka (Dh28,307) and promised to pay an equal amount later.

Alam, however, was apprehended immediately by people in the neighbourhood as he tried to dump Rajon’s body at a secluded place on July 8 while alert Bangladeshi expatriates in Saudi Arabia spotted his younger brother in Jeddah and handed him over to Saudi police, through the Bangladesh consulate there.

The foreign ministry and police said a process was launched to bring him back home to be tried for the murder.

But public anger mounted further in Bangladesh as another detained prime accused, Moyna Mia, disclosed that Rajon was tortured for some long four hours until his death. A video clip of the torture was only 28 minutes in length.

Mia, a security guard in the neighbourhood, allegedly accused Rajon of being involved in stealing a rickshaw van and invited the other killers to an isolated area, where they tied the minor to a pole and mercilessly beat him for hours with a metal rod.

Footage of the killing, which has gone viral on social media and newspaper websites, shows that Rajon screaming for help, crying for water and begging for his life while the killers laugh and jeer at him.

The boy used to sell vegetables that the family grew in homestead in a local market place, to support the family and supplement his driver father’s earnings.

Relatives and neighbours alleged Mia actually wanted to rape Rajon and, failing to do that, set up a case to punish him.

The reports said Moyna was hiding at home but his mother herself called in neighbours to hand her son over to police as she came to know what he did.

TV footage showed her saying, “I want him [Moyna] to face justice”.

Police meanwhile detained two bystanders, familiar to the killers, who watched as the boy was clubbed to death. One of them is said to have taken pictures to be posted on Facebook.