JEDDAH — The police arrested a Bangladeshi driver accused of murdering a 13-year-old boy in Sylhet before escaping to the Kingdom. The arrest was made following a tip-off from alert Bangladeshi expatriates. The brutal killing of the boy whose video footage of being beaten to death in caused widespread outrage. The boy was tied up while being tortured to death. Makkah police said the accused had escaped from Bangladesh to the Kingdom despite a travel ban imposed on him. His accomplices had taken the video in the first place. They were arrested but he managed to escape. The accused, following his arrest, claimed he tortured the boy because the boy stole his bicycle. He claimed he did not know that the boy had died and he never intended to kill him. He only wanted to teach him a lesson. The fact that he was arrested in the Kingdom was due to a tip-off from Bangladeshi expatriates in Saudi Arabia , according to a report in Business Standard. The report cited Labor Counselor in Jeddah Mokammel Hossain as saying that the accused was caught by embassy officials on the tip-off by expatriates and later handed over to Saudi police. The teen, son of a driver, was tortured to death. The teen begged for his life while the killers laughed and jeered at him in the 28-minute video of the July 8 incident in Sylhet's Kumargaon. "We got hold of the real culprit with the help of his employer (kafeel — sponsor) and he has confessed what he did," a Bangladesh Embassy official in Jeddah told a TV channel. The Bangladesh government imposed an embargo on the accused, who worked as a driver in Saudi Arabia, from leaving the country. However, locals said the accused fled to Saudi Arabia soon after his brother was detained for killing the teen. Bangladesh Embassy officials said they caught the accused in a makeshift refuge after fellow expatriates tracked him down there and informed the mission. Later he was handed over to the Saudi police.
