Bhubaneswar, Sept. 8 -- Five boys studying at a madrasa in Odisha's Nayagarh district have been sent to a juvenile home for strangulating a fellow 12-year-old student to death after subjecting him to sexual abuse for months, police said on Sunday. The victim's body was recovered from a septic tank at the madrasa in Kulasara panchayat on September 3, two days after he went missing, a senior police officer said. Police questioned around 15 students of the residential madrasa and zeroed in on a 15-year-old student, who turned out to be the mastermind behind the murder, and later detained four more students involved in the crime, Nayagarh additional superintendent of police (ASP) Subash Chandra Panda, who headed the investigation, said. "The accused had been forcing unnatural sexual relations with the victim for nearly a year. When the victim resisted and threatened to inform his parents, the accused, along with others, subjected him to physical and mental torture," Panda said. On August 31, the five boys had attempted to kill the victim by pushing him into the toilet tank, but he survived with only minor head injuries, the ASP said. "The victim was too terrified to report the matter to his teachers or his family," he added. On September 2, the accused again attempted to sexually abuse the victim. "When he resisted, four of the accused students held him down while the mastermind strangled him to death. The body was then dumped in the septic tank, and the perpetrators informed the headmaster that the boy was missing," the senior officer said. The victim's body was discovered floating in an abandoned septic tank on September 3, alongside a dog's carcass. Police conducted detailed interrogations of all students, analysed CCTV footage, and examined scientific team reports during their investigation, Panda said. The five accused boys were detained, and on Saturday produced them before the Nayagarh juvenile court, which sent them to a juvenile home in Angul, police said. A case has been registered under sections 103 (murder) and 238 (destruction of evidence) of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS) and relevant sections of the Pocso Act, police said....