Watch the footage (warning: graphic content)

Indian television has broadcast footage of a mob beating up a suspected thief and a police officer dragging him from the back of a motorbike until he loses consciousness.

The crowd had accused Mohammed Aurangzeb of stealing a woman’s gold chain in the Bhagalpur district of Bihar, one of India's poorest, most populous and most lawless states.

They ripped off his shirt, tied his hands behind his back and whipped, punched and kicked him repeatedly until he was writhing in the mud, begging for mercy — all in front of a televison camera.

It was not immediately clear why the camera was there, but the footage also showed a uniformed police officer tying Mr Aurangzeb’s legs to the back of a police motorbike and dragging him through the mud.

“He was dragged for some time and the police constable stopped his bike only when Aurangzeb lost consciousness,” Afzal Amanullah, the state’s home secretary, told a news conference in Patna, the state capital. “This was an inhuman act and an unfortunate incident of a policeman taking the law into his own hands.”

Mob rule and police brutality are commonplace in India, especially in Bihar, and the victims are usually the poor or those from the lowest tiers of the Indian caste system. In 1979, police in Bhagalpur blinded 31 alleged criminals by pouring acid into their eyes — and were applauded by many locals. Many similar attacks go unpunished.

Today's incident was a rare example of such egregious abuse being captured on camera and broadcast across the country by many of India’s relatively new private television channels.

Nitish Kumar, Bihar’s chief minister, condemned the attack and promised a full investigation.India’s National Human Rights Commission, a government investigative body, said that it had asked Bihar police to produce a report on the incident.

Local officials said that the two policemen involved had been suspended, while Mr Aurangzeb, a Muslim, had been arrested for robbery and taken to a prison hospital with serious internal injuries.

The policemen and most of the mob were Hindus, they said, but declined to comment on whether that was a reason for the attack. Bihar, with a population of 83 million, has been blighted by violence between its Hindu and Muslim communities since India won independence from Britain in 1947.

After the incident a crowd of angry Muslims surrounded the police station and pelted it with stones in protest at Mr Aurangzeb’s treatment.

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