Tuesday, July 26, 2016

A 9-year-old factory worker in Bangladesh was killed when other employees inserted an air compressor's nozzle into his rectum and turned it on

Police say senior employees were upset that Sagar Barman went into a restricted area of Zobeda Textile Mill in Dhaka. But Sagar's father, also a worker at Zobeda, said that his son was killed because he complained about the beatings they received from senior employees over small mistakes. An assistant administrative officer has been arrested in connection with Sagar's death, and police are looking for seven more employees said to have been involved. An administrative officer at Zobeda denies that Sagar was killed, saying that Sagar may have died when he tried to use the air compressor to clean his mouth. Despite child labor being illegal in Bangladesh, UNICEF estimates that there are 4.9 million children under the age of 14 working in factories and elsewhere. Sagar had been working at Zobeda for seven months when he was killed. “I thought, as we are poor, it will be helpful to run our family if my son Sagar can do some work in this factory,” his father said. Two-dozen child workers were sent home from Zobeda, which supplies yarn for Western clothing, when police came to investigate Sagar's death. It's believed that hundreds of children work there. Sagar is the second child worker in Bangladesh to be killed by having an air compressor inserted into his rectum in 2016. Two men were sentenced to death for doing the same thing to a 13-year-old boy in another town in August 2015.

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