killer of 100 children

Javed Iqbal

Killer of 100 children

"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."

+Javed Iqbal sodomized and killed 100 boys in Pakistan. All of the boys were street urchins which he drugged, molested, strangled and then dissolved in vats of acid, keeping their shoes and clothes as trophies. About halfway through, began a photodocumentation of his efforts, which he sent to police when the goal of 100 was attained. As nobody in Islamabad notices when a street urchin goes missing, Iqbal claims he could have achieved 500 had he the desire.

+According to Javed’s original statement, he was brutally beaten and left for dead by a pair of young street kids he had taken into his home. Javed said he suffered such a severe head injury that his memory was affected. He underwent several operations, he said, and during the process lost both his house and his car. His mother, so broken-hearted at the condition her son had sunk to, simply died, he told police. He turned to police for help, he said, but they refused. Instead, he argued, the police turned on him, accusing him – falsely, he insisted – of sodomy.

+With no one else to turn to he looked to four young friends – identified only as Nadeem, Shabir, Sajid and Ishaq Billa, to care for him, he told authorities. It was then, according to the statement he gave authorities, that Javed decided to enlist them in a gruesome plot to avenge his mother’s death.

+The price for her suffering and his was the deaths of 100 children. They could easily be found in the market square that surrounds the minaret.

+One of his victim was Ijaz, a beautiful boy in a tattered white shirt with a Kara, an iron ring, around his ankle.

+Iqbal plied Ijal with a powerful sedative and as it started to kick in, he gently queried the boy, trying to learn as much about the boy’s family and his life as he possibly could. Though most serial killers objectify their victims, dehumanize them and reduce them to archetypes or caricatures, Javed was different. He meticulously documented the lives of his victims, jotting down each significant detail, authorities say. Perhaps, some have speculated, this was a way of winning the boy’s confidence, a way of taking a child who no one cared about, a child who had, through a lifetime of deprivation and abuse, developed a hard shell, and making him feel special.

+He was as meticulous in the disposal of the bodies as he was with his notes on his victims, authorities later said. He was patient. Hair and bone take longer to dissolve then flesh, and he would wait until the remains were thoroughly liquefied before disposing of them. At first, he dumped the liquid in a nearby sewer, but when neighbors began to complain of the stench, he began depositing it in the Ravi River, he told police.

+His diaries provided a detailed account of the killings of Ijaz and the others, authorities said. Once his chosen victim was too weak and groggy to resist, Javed would rape him. Then, as he moaned unconscious on the floor Javed would fetch an iron chain, wrap it around the child’s neck and slowly strangle him. He would then hack the boy’s remains to pieces and dissolve the remains in a vat of cheap hydrochloric acid

+Of all the boys who vanished inside Javed’s home, only the partially dissolved remains of two – Ijaz and another boy -- were ever found. Javed had kept them in a drum of acid left conspicuously in the open at the house, left there intentionally, the killer would later say, to prove that his tale of murder and mayhem was true.

+“I had sexually assaulted 100 children before killing them,” read the first placard. “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.”

+The passive Pakistani authorities finally arrested Javed Iqbal, a chemical engineer of 42 years old. He became in the worst serial killer of the 53 Pakistani years of independence. Iqbal was arrested when after of other exhibitionist act he went to the offices of the local newspaper The News in Lahore and conffesed the crimes.

+It was unimaginable that such a crime could have occurred, authorities told reporters. How was it possible that so many children could have died so horribly without anyone even suspecting? In fact, of the 100 children who had vanished in the five months since Javed’s killing spree had begun, only 25 had been reported missing. Such is life in Pakistan, commentators later opined. Children vanish here and no one trusts the police to help. As the mother of one young victim told Time Magazine in a December 27, 1999 interview, “it never even occurred to me to go to the police for help.”

+The judge sentenced Javed to be strangled to death with the same chain he used to kill the children. The judge further ordered that his body “will then be cut into 100 pieces and put in acid,” the same concoction of hydrochloric and sulfuric acids the killer used to dispose of their bodies of his young victims.

+The morning of the October 8, 2001, Javed Iqbal and his accomplice of 17 years old, Sajid Ahmad were found dead in their cell in the Kot Lakhpat prison. They committed suicide, apparently by hang with their sheets but many people said that they were murdered by the police.

+The autopsies revealed that they had been beaten but the autorities said that they committed suicide.