PORTLAND – A man awaiting trial on a rape charge claims he was beaten by four or five York County Jail officers and that the officer who instigated the beating threatened to kill him if he told anyone about it.

“He said if I said anything about him or wrote anything about him, he would kill me unless I go back to my own country,” Kingsley Nwaturocha said in a Cumberland County Jail interview Monday with the Journal Tribune of Biddeford.

The 43-year-old native of Nigeria was transferred to the Portland jail on April 4, two days after the alleged beating.

His complaint is under investigation by the Attorney General’s Office and the York County Sheriff’s Department. Two corrections officers and one supervisor have been placed on paid administrative leave pending the outcome of the investigation.