Javed Iqbal (serial killer)

Javed Iqbal Mughal
Born Javed Iqbal
1956
Lahore, Punjab, Pakistan
Died 8 October 2001(2001-10-08) (aged 45)
Lahore, Punjab, Pakistan
Cause of death Probable suicide
Criminal penalty Death
Conviction(s) Child sex abuse
Murder
Details
Victims 100
Country Pakistan
Date apprehended
 30 December 1999

Javed Iqbal Mughal[1] (8 October 1956 – 8 October 2001), was a Pakistani serial killer who was found guilty of the sexual abuse and murder of 100 boys.

Early life

Iqbal was the sixth child of his businessman father. He attended Government Islamia College, Railway Road Lahore as an intermediate student. In 1978, while still a student, he started a steel recasting business. Iqbal lived, along with boys, in a villa in Shadbagh which his father had purchased.[2]

Murders, arrest, and trial

In December 1999, Iqbal sent a letter to police and a Lahore newspaper's chief news editor Khawar Naeem Hashmi confessing to the murders of 100 boys, all aged between 6 and 16. In the letter, he claimed to have strangled and dismembered the victims - mostly runaways and orphans living on the streets of Lahore - and disposed of their bodies using vats of hydrochloric acid. He then dumped the remains in a local river. In his house, police and reporters found bloodstains on the walls and floor with the chain with which Iqbal claimed to have strangled his victims, photographs of many of his victims in plastic bags. These items were neatly labeled with handwritten pamphlets. Two vats of acid with partially dissolved human remains were also left in the open for police to find, with a note claiming "the bodies in the house have deliberately not been disposed of so that authorities will find them."[3]

Iqbal confessed in his letter that he planned to drown himself in the Ravi River following his crimes but after unsuccessfully dragging the river with nets, police launched what was, at that time, the largest manhunt Pakistan had ever witnessed. Four accomplices, teenage boys who had shared Iqbal's three-bedroom flat, were arrested in Sohawa. Within days, one of them died in police custody, with a post-mortem suggested that force had been used against him; allegedly, he jumped from a window.[4]

It was a month before Iqbal turned himself in at the offices of the Urdu-language newspaper Daily Jang on 30 December 1999. He was subsequently arrested. He stated that he had surrendered to the newspaper because he feared for his life and was concerned that the police would kill him.[3]

Iqbal was sentenced to death by hanging, the judge passed sentence saying "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."[5]

Iqbal was found dead in his cell before the execution could be carried out.[6]

References

  1. ↑ "LAHORE: The story of a pampered boy." Dawn. 11 October 2001. Retrieved on 26 May 2014.
  2. ↑ "Serial killer Javed Iqbal who sexually abused and killed 100 children in Pakistan" (Archive). India TV. Updated 26 February 2014. Retrieved on 26 May 2014.
  3. 1 2 McGraw, Seamus. "A Letter from a Killer." All about Javed Iqbal. Crime Library p. 4 at the Wayback Machine (archived 13 June 2003) (Archive).
  4. ↑ "Police detained after suspect's death." BBC. Wednesday 8 December 1999.
  5. ↑ "Death for Pakistan serial killer." BBC. Thursday 16 March 2000.
  6. ↑ "dawn.com"

Further reading

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