Javed Iqbal (serial killer)

Javed Iqbal Umayr[1] (1956 – 8 October 2001) was a Pakistani serial killer who confessed to the sexual abuse and murder of 100 boys, ranging in age from 6 to 16. Iqbal strangled the victims, dismembered the corpses and dissolved them in acid as a way to conceal the evidence. He was found guilty and sentenced to death in the same manner that he killed the boys, being strangled first, then cut into a hundred pieces in front of the parents of the victims, and then be dissolved into acid, but he committed suicide before the sentence could be carried out.

Javed Iqbal Umayr
Born
Javed Iqbal

1956
Lahore, Punjab, Pakistan
Died8 October 2001(2001-10-08) (aged 45)
Lahore, Punjab, Pakistan
Cause of deathSuicide while incarcerated
Conviction(s)Child sex abuse
Murder
Criminal penaltyDeath
Details
Victims100 confirmed
Span of crimes
1998–1999
CountryPakistan
Date apprehended
30 December 1999

Early life

Iqbal was the sixth of eight children 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 for him.[2]

Murders

In December 1999, Iqbal sent a letter to police and a Lahore newspaper chief news editor Khawar Naeem Hashmi confessing to the rape and murder of 100 runaway 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.[3]

Inside Iqbal's house, police and reporters found bloodstains on the walls and floor, along with the chain with which Iqbal claimed to have strangled his victims and photographs of many of his victims in plastic bags. These items were neatly labelled 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.[4]

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 the largest manhunt in Pakistan history. 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 suggesting that force had been used against him; allegedly, he jumped from a window.[5]

Iqbal's motive for committing his murders was his infuriation at a perceived injustice at the hands of Lahore police who had arrested him on charges relating to an act of sodomy against a young runaway boy in the 1990s. No charges were brought in relation to this offence. His mother had "been forced to watch [his] decline" before suffering a fatal heart attack. He had therefore resolved to make 100 mothers cry for their sons as his mother had been forced to do for him before her death.[6]

Trial

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.[4]

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."[7]

Iqbal was found hanged, dead in his cell before the execution could be carried out, with another "accomplice" hanged in a nearby cell the same night.[8]

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See also

References
  1. "LAHORE: The story of a pampered boy Archived 27 May 2014 at the Wayback Machine." 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. "Pakistan 'Serial Killer' Under Interrogation". TBBC News. 31 December 1999. Retrieved 28 July 2020.
  4. McGraw, Seamus. "A Letter from a Killer." All about Javed Iqbal. Crime Library p. 4 at the Wayback Machine (archived 13 June 2003) (Archive).
  5. "Police detained after suspect's death Archived 27 May 2014 at the Wayback Machine." BBC. Wednesday 8 December 1999.
  6. "Pakistan 'Serial Killer' Under Interrogation". TBBC News. 31 December 1999. Retrieved 28 July 2020.
  7. "Death for Pakistan serial killer Archived 27 May 2014 at the Wayback Machine." BBC. Thursday 16 March 2000.
  8. "dawn.com"

Further reading

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