Javed Iqbal was a notorious serial killer from Lahore, Punjab, Pakistan. He killed 100 boys during a five-month period.
Before he killed the boys, he had been arrested in June 1998 for procuring the services of two boy prostitutes. He went off on bail shortly afterwards.
The boys that he killed were taken off the street. Each boy, taken to his house and drugged by a sedative. Iqbal asked each boy about his life and jotted down notes on what the boys were like. Iqbal then raped each boy and then slowly strangled each boy with an iron chain after that. He then cut the body of each boy into pieces put the pieces in a vat filled with acid. Once all of the remains were liquified, he dumped them. He first used the sewer until neighbors complained of an acrid stench. He then decided to use the Ravi River. The partially liquified remains of two boys, one of whom was named Ijaz, were the only ones found of the 100 boys that Iqbal killed. They were kept in an acid drum that Iqbal left open outside of his house, as evidence of his crime.
Iqbal kept clothing and shoes as trophies of his crimes. When he got to his 50th boy, he started taking pictures of them.
In a confession, he said “it cost me 120 rupees (about $2.40 United States dollars) to erase each victim.”
He sent information that he committed the crimes to Islamabad-based Jang, the most circulated Urdu newspaper in Pakistan. He surrendered on 30 December 1998 after he walked into the police headquarters.
Nobody had noticed that the boys that Iqbal killed had disappeared. Iqbal claimed that he could have killed 500 if he had wanted to. He reportedly said "I am Javed Iqbal, killer of 100 children... I hate this world, I am not ashamed of my action and I am ready to die. I have no regrets. I killed 100 children."
Iqbal was sentenced to be strangled 100 times, then cut into 100 pieces and put in acid.
Before this sentence could be carried out, he was found strangled with his bed sheets while in his prison cell on 7 October 2001. One of his accomplices, Sajid, was also strangled. Pakistani authorities say that the men committed suicide.
Most people in Pakistan believe that the men were killed be someone else. Autopsy results show that the two men were bleeding from the nose and mouth when they died. The results show that Sajid was beaten, and that several partially healed wounds inflicted by a blunt object were found on Javed's body. Prison guard Iftikar Husain reported that "I was asleep when the incident took place."
Prison official Abdussattar Ajiz said that in October 7, Iftikar Husain didn't report the incident to his bosses immediately, and instead "untied the knots of the bed sheets, laid the bodies on the floor to create the impression that they were asleep. He did so to save his own skin." Liaquat Ali, Husain's relief, didn't check on the prisoners, who were found dead the next morning.
At the time of writing the Crimelibrary article, the case was still under investigation.
