MULTAN, Nov 28: A villager of Lodhran district accused the area police of trying to protect some influential people who had murdered his teenaged boy.

An elderly couple from Mauza Chamb Kalayar, Imam Bakhsh and Nazeeran Mai, held a press conference here on Tuesday along with a number of their sympathisers to record protest against the Qureshiwala police.

They told reporters that their 14-year-old son Mohammad Safdar, employed at a tea-stall on Sheiku Pul, went amiss on Nov 10. They started searching for him and came to know that four men, Mohammad Wasiq, Mohammad Akmal, Atara Baloch and Javed, had forcibly taken the boy to their hide-out in the riverine belt.

Mohammad Akhtar, brother of the kidnappee, approached the kidnappers and inquired about his young brother. After dilly-dallying for a few days, they dropped Safdar at his home on Nov 16.

The boy told his parents that the kidnappers not only sodomised him repeatedly but also forced him to dance in women’s clothes. According to the parents, the boy had yet to finish his story that Akmal, Atara and Javed again entered their house and dragged Safdar to cotton fields nearby. When the boy returned, he was vomiting and died within 10 minutes. The family feared that Safdar was administered poison. Mr Akhtar lodged the FIR with the Qureshiwala police on the same day. However, the police did not register the kidnapping and sodomy charges against the accused, none of whom had so far been arrested.

Meanwhile, some locally influential people had been pressurising them into striking a deal with the murderers, Imam Bakhsh said. Police was threatening to book them on charges of poisoning Safdar to death and putting the blame on others if they did not compromise with the accused, he added. The ailing Imam Bakhsh told newsmen that although he did not even have money to perform the last rites of his son, the doctors who carried out the post-mortem examination of Safdar had asked him to purchase from the market the “material consumed during the post-mortem”.

He said 10 days had passed since the murder of his son, but the post-mortem report was yet to be finalised. He alleged that police were demanding Rs2,000 for completing the report.