Javed Iqbal Mughal
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Javed Iqbal Mughal (October 8, 1956 – October 8, 2001) was a Pakistani serial killer who murdered at least 100 boys and was shown sexually abusing two boys. He would strangle the boys, and then he would cut up their bodies and dump them into acid.
Upon his arrest, he was sentenced to death by strangulation in front of the boys' parents, and then his body would be cut up and dissolved in acid. He committed suicide before he could be executed.
Biography edit
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.
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.
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.
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 Pakistani 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.
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.
It was a month before Iqbal turned himself in at the offices of the 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.
Iqbal was sentenced to death; 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." The Interior Minister, Moinuddin Haider, contradicted the sentence by stating that Pakistan is a signatory of the Human Rights Commission, so "such punishments are not allowed."
Iqbal apparently hanged himself in his cell before the execution could be carried out, with another "accomplice" hanged in a nearby cell the same night.