DHAKA, July 18: A mob beat to death six college students in a village near the Bangladesh capital on Monday after suspecting the teenagers were planning a robbery, police said.

Hundreds of villagers surrounded the seven boys and beat them with iron rods and bamboo sticks after someone raised a robbery alarm at the farming village of Baradeshi, local police officer Anwar Hossain said.

Police recovered the six bodies and sent the seventh teenager to a hospital, where he was being treated for critical injuries, Hossain said.

Later on Monday, hundreds of students from a nearby college blocked a road to protest the killings and halted traffic for about two hours, Dhaka's Prothom Alo newspaper reported. The protesters dispersed after police ordered an investigation into the killings. Three of the boys attended the same college as the protesters.

Hossain said the boys were sitting at an empty bus station outside the village where residents have been on guard since a robbery two weeks ago. It was not immediately clear why the students went there in predawn darkness.—AP