A 3-year-old boy in Xinyi of Xuzhou in east China's Jiangsu province died under the wheels of a BMW, which ran over the boy four times in less than 30 seconds.

The BMW driver surnamed Wu has been detained for further investigation while the incident triggered an uproar among netizens.

The incident happened around 11 am on Sept 7 when the boy Le Le (not his real name) was playing behind a BMW X6 car in a residential community, the Nanjing-based Yangtze Evening News reported on Monday.

The driver drove the car backwards without looking behind the car and knocked down the boy, the report said.

"My son was run over four times," the boy's father surnamed Li was quoted as saying while crying and watching the surveillance video that happened to catch the entire accident.

The video shows that at 11:03:18, the upper half of the boy's body was hit by the car, knocking him down. The boys was on the ground, kicking his legs. The car stopped for a moment. At 11:03:30, the car ran over the boy's body for the first time with its left rear wheel. At 11:03:33, the driver drove ahead, so the boy was run over a second time. At 11:03:38, the driver stopped the car and got out, but later the empty car continued to roll backwards and its left rear wheel ran over the boy for the third time. At 11:03:44, the car's left front wheel ran over the boy for the fourth time.

Then, the driver saw the boy, who was lying in a pool of blood, and left the accident site without taking any rescue measures.

"The driver killed my son intentionally," Li was quoted by Yangtze Evening News as having said.

The BMW car was equipped with both rear-view mirrors and a radar that sounds a warning when the car, driving in reverse, nears an object.

The driver should have been able to see the boy, who was 1.16 meters tall, while driving the car, the report quoted Li as saying.

When the driver ran over the boy the first time, he should have gotten out to see what was happening, Li reportedly said.

An official at the publicity department of Xinyi Public Security Bureau, who declined to be identified, told China Daily on Monday that the BMW driver has been taken into custody.

"The only thing I can tell you is that the driver has been detained, and the real cause of the accident remains unclear," he said. "The investigation is still being carried by the police."

Alcohol tests showed the driver was not legally drunk at the time of the accident. And the accident site is smooth cement pavement and the visibility was also good, according to the Xinyi traffic police department.

The driver did not look behind his car before driving backwards, which was the direct reason for the accident, local traffic police said, according to the Yangtze Evening News.

The case drew public concerns immediately after it was reported. On news portal qq.com, more than 228,000 web users voted to express their anger toward the driver.

The topics of an online forum tieba.baidu.com also mainly focused on the case on Monday, and some netizens even posted the license plate number of the BMW vehicle.

Zhang Lingfei, the reporter of Yangtze Evening News who originally covered the story, told China Daily on Monday that the boy's father could not bear the sadness after he was interviewed by several reporters in the morning, forcing him to recall the memories repeatedly.

"He is so sad that he doesn't want to be disturbed any more," Zhang said.