December 1999. Police in Pakistan find a package and a 32-page diary that outlines the brutal murder of 100 children aged eight to 16. The writer of the diary explains in gruesome detail how he lured the kids into his trap, strangled them, chopped them into small pieces, and dissolved their body parts in acid. He even provided police photos of the victims prior to their demise. Cops were dealing with the worst serial killer ever in the country of Pakistan, a killer who enraged the public so much they literally wanted to rip him to pieces. Maybe his fate should mirror his crimes, people said, with Hammurabi’s code in mind: “A life for a life, an eye for an eye, a nose for a nose, an ear for an ear, a tooth for a tooth, an equal wound for a wound.”
Welcome to one of the darkest stories in the annals of human history. The extent of these atrocities would come to light when the killer, 40 year old Javel Iqbal, sent a letter to a newspaper in Lahore that read like this: “All the details of the murders are contained in the diary and the 32-page notebook that have been placed in the room and had also been sent to the authorities. This is my confessional statement.”
When the cops got to his three-room apartment what awaited them was a scene of utter horror. The walls were covered in blood; children’s clothes were strewn across the floor; dozens of pairs of little shoes and sandals were scattered around. In one room, there was a vat of acid, still bubbling, with what looked like the remains of legs bobbing up and down. A cop looked at the floor and picked up a note that was lying there. It read: “The bodies in the house have deliberately not been disposed of so that authorities will find them.” There were the remains of three children in that house.
On a blood-spattered wall, there was a large piece of paper. Scrawled on it were the words, “Yesterday, I killed my employee, Sajid, and incinerated his body in the container so that he could be punished for theft and for disturbing me again and again.” What in God’s name were they dealing with, the cops thought as they searched through the mess.
For some reason, the killer had kept snakes. Police found the boxes they would have been contained in. In another room, they found a bunch of board games that children might enjoy. One of the cops picked up a video cassette from the floor, a popular Italian exploitation film entitled, “The Beast in Heat.” On another wall was another note that read, “The world will remember this mode of revenge. The bodies flowed through the sewer just like my blood.”
The lengthy diary described how he’d killed the kids. There were even sometimes details as to where they likely lived, and who their parents were. The diary explained how he got hold of them and the terrible things he did to them. It even detailed how much acid it took to dissolve a body, which according to the killer was exactly 120 Pakistani Rupees, about 100 Indian Rupees back then. Very soon after, the cops launched one of the biggest manhunts that Pakistan had ever seen. But, who was this man, this monster?
He was the sixth child of a fairly well-off businessman named Mohammad Ali Mughal. He went to school and college and had pretty much everything he needed. His pop set him up in the steel recasting business and let him stay at one of his houses. To all appearances, he was a young professional man who was doing just fine in life, but obviously, that wasn’t the case at all.
As you’ll see, behind that normal life were some very dark secrets. He hadn’t acted alone in the murders. Prior to his arrest, four teenagers were arrested on charges of helping him. One of them soon died in police custody. The cops said he’d jumped out of a window, but reports stated it was more likely they’d beaten him to death. In fact, the murder was so obvious the administration of the Lahore cops was moved around. Still, the 100s of relatives of the missing kids who’d seen photos of their loved ones weren’t exactly upset over the slaying of one of Iqbal’s helpers. But where was he?
Well, like a scene from the movie “Seven”, on December 30 he walked right into the office of the Urdu daily newspaper. He didn’t exactly hold bloody arms up in front of them and said, “You’re looking for me”, but he did say this: “I am Javed Iqbal, killer of 100 children. I hate this world, I am not ashamed of my actions and I am ready to die. I have no regrets.” Things got very strange after that. He said that the reason he hadn’t gone to the cops and had chosen the newspaper was that he feared the police would kill him and try to make his murder look like something else.
As you already know and as you’ll see soon, he was certainly not being overly paranoid for harboring that belief. He then changed his story, telling the judge in court that he hadn’t actually killed the kids but had seen them being murdered by someone else. He told them that the reason he’d written the letters, the posters, and sent the packages, was because he wanted to bring attention to the fact that parents had neglected those kids and had left them to their own devices in the streets. Sure, there’d been previous confessions, his lawyer said, but some of them had been made during a three-week ordeal at the hands of very persuasive cops.
Still, this is the guy that had detailed the killings. It’s the guy that had children’s clothes and shoes in his house. Could he really not be the killer? 105 witnesses were introduced to the court by the prosecution. Even though the defense had claimed that many of the kids weren’t actually dead and had gone back home, the testimony of witnesses didn’t seem to suggest that. In fact, every day during the two-month trial parents of victims and angry citizens waited outside the courthouse screaming that this guy had to be put to death. All over the world, people watched news clips of parents weeping as they rummaged through the pile of children’s clothes police laid out.
It also turned out that Iqbal had been arrested in the past for a crime involving a boy. The prosecutor said, ok, so we don’t know where the bodies are, but there’s enough evidence to put this man to death. But there was another story, too. If 100 kids had been killed, how could that happen, and no one report something when each disappearance occurred?
Some people blamed poverty, and the fact some of those kids were lost and abandoned, often left alone to beg. Others talked about a taboo issue hardly ever broached in Pakistan, the issue of poor kids being prey to vulturous men. “The whole macabre case underlines the terrible sexual frustration and perversion that lie just below the surface of our hypocritical society,” said one Pakistani journalist. He said such abuse was rampant, but the crimes were not spoken about.
In court before the judge, Iqbal said, “Whatever I wanted to say has been distorted. I have seen the children being killed. I am an eyewitness to that. I was considered an insane person. But I beg that my point of view must also be heard. I considered myself as a culprit because I have been made a culprit by police.” He said the cops in the past had extorted cash from him and his family. He also said that he was beaten by his servants and he’d gone to the cops to complain. Instead of helping him, they also beat him and then set him up on a false charge.
He said, after that, he made a pledge of revenge. This is what he said to reporters when he turned up at their office to hand himself in: “I could have killed 500, this was not a problem, money was not a problem. But the pledge I had taken was of 100 children, and I never wanted to violate this.” He later changed this story, saying after the beating by his servants, he and some others went looking for them. He said it was during those searches that he discovered many young boys living on the streets, abandoned by their parents.
He told the court that he took photos of them to bring attention to this social problem. Stories came out that painted a picture of Iqbal’s secret life. It was said that when he was in his 20s his parents tried very hard to arrange a marriage for him, but he resisted their every attempt and ignored the photos of women they put in front of him. The reason was he wasn’t interested in women, but the opposite sex and preferably someone of a young age. He did actually tell his parents he was going to get married, but it turned out he wanted to do that because the woman was the older sister of one of the boys he was attracted to. That fake marriage lasted only three months.
It was also revealed how he opened a video game arcade, offering free stuff to boys. People testified that he enjoyed nothing more than to just sit and watch them play. Sometimes he’d surreptitiously put a 100 rupee note on the floor. After a boy had picked it up and kept it, Iqbal would announce that everyone had to be searched in a private room. It was said that some terrible things happened to some of the boys, after which they were always given the 100 rupee note as a “gesture of goodwill.”
Some people that knew him, understood his ways, saying he was an “evil genius” that was cunning when it came to getting what he wanted. Parents actually stopped their kids from going to that arcade after hearing what the wealthy young man was up to, but then he opened a gym, and also an aquarium, as another way to get close to his prey.
The court heard these stories and they’d seen the evidence that was available. He had his sob story and it appeared he had a passionate lawyer that believed his stories. One of the problems was, the Pakistani police were corrupt and sometimes murderous, so accusations leveled against them by Iqbal weren’t exactly unbelievable. It was actually discovered during the trial that many of the parents hadn’t reported their kids missing because they were afraid to speak to the cops.
That might sound strange to some of you, but in many parts of the developing world, people would rather not report something, even a car accident, because the victims can end up paying corrupt cops or face false charges. In fact, it came out that young children went missing all the time in parts of the country and no one breathed a word about it to the authorities. One mother whose kid was a victim said to Time magazine in the US, “It never even occurred to me to go to the police for help.” A Pakistani intellectual and newspaper columnist named Irfan Husain explained why, “The vast majority who are forced to come in contact with our cops, nine times out of ten, they are shaken down even when reporting a crime.”
This case, as big as it was, was turning into something bigger, which was a powerful expose of societal wrongs. That same columnist said Iqbal could easily have killed 500 poor kids and he absolutely would have gotten away with it. He had money, and his victims didn’t. The cops, he alluded, were more interested in money than justice.
When judgment day came the country was on the edge of one giant seat. Mobs crowded the courthouse, small riots broke out in the streets. The judge had the weight of a country on his shoulders. The police scurried around in dark places like rats in the gutters, hoping no more light would shine on their misdeeds. The Judge, Allah Baksh Ranja, shocked everyone. He didn’t only hand down the death sentence, but he ordered something that wasn’t actually written into the law. He said the death sentence should be carried out in public at Pakistan's National Monument in Lahore.
This is exactly what he told Iqbal that day in court: “You will be strangled to death in front of the parents whose children you killed. Your body will then be cut into 100 pieces and put in acid, the same way you killed the children.” The 100 pieces were for the 100 victims. It was a case of an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, what’s sometimes called the law of retaliation.
Even for some hardliners, the punishment was a bit too much for the late 20th century. Iqbal’s lawyer thought so, telling the British press: “There is no law which allows a person to be hanged publicly, to cut up pieces of the body. It is against the constitution of Pakistan.”
So, did it happen just as the judge had ordered? Well, we would say what we’re about to tell you is shocking, but after hearing what you’ve heard already you probably expect it.
One day while Iqbal was in jail, he was found dead in his cell. The same day one of his accomplices was also found dead in his cell. This happened just four days after Pakistan’s highest Islamic Court had agreed to listen to Iqbal’s appeal against the death sentence. How could this happen in one of the most high-profile criminal cases in the history of Pakistan?
Surely someone should have been keeping a close eye on those guys. There weren’t any CCTV cameras working that night. As for the guard who should have heard or seen something, he’d fallen asleep on the job, a seemingly not uncommon occurrence when high-profile people die in jail cells. You know how the authorities explained those deaths, and you’d be right in thinking that some of the public didn’t buy into it even as much as people detested those men.
Not only was Iqbal found with a bloody nose and cuts to his face, but an autopsy revealed he’d been severely beaten over a period of days. It was also revealed that he’d recently written to his lawyer stating that he believed he was going to be murdered in his cell by prison authorities. You could call it rough justice, but the real injustice was the lives of some of the poorest most vulnerable families in Pakistan remained blighted by abuses and corruption.
comment 0 Comments
more_vert