According to the information received, on September 30th, , three robbers reportedly entered the house of Dr. Rauf on Iqbal Road. One of the robbers, identified as Zafar Iqbal, was overpowered by the family members and neighbours, and handed over to the Westridge Police Station.

The other two accomplices however, have escaped. The police claimed that they released Zafar Iqbal. However, it is believed that he died in police custody as a result of torture and that his body has been disposed of. The victim's body has not yet been found. The Superintendent of the Police SP , Inayatullah Farooqi, who was identified as a complainant in the FIR lodged against the policemen, said that he could not find Zafar Iqbal during his inspection of the police station.

He said there was no record of the arrest of the accused in the police station and the SHO concerned also failed to give a satisfactory reply regarding his whereabouts.

He said police had broken locks of the main gate and a room of the house to come around the drums of chemicals and other items but had not taken into custody the broken locks. The lists of items, now a property in the case, were prepared by him as the SHO was unable to write because of an injury to his right hand.

The ASI said the SHO had sustained a bullet injury before his joining the police station in August and he did not know how it had happened. He said the entire formality was completed in around four hours and the items were removed from the house the next day. They were left at the house of Javed Iqbal under the supervision of a sub-inspector, he said.

Photo studio owner Khalil Shahzad said prints of the photographs of the missing children were made by his employee and not by him. The relatives of three missing children also recorded their statements indicating as to how they recognized clothes, shoes and other belongings of their wards from the bundles recovered from the house of the accused.

LAHORE, March 8: Javed Iqbal, the alleged killer of children, on Wednesday submitted before the trial court that the missing children were alive and that he did not murder any boy.

Replying to questions put to him by the court comprising Additional District and Sessions Judge Allah Bakhsh Ranjha, he said not a single boy was murdered. The accused submitted a written statement spread on 20 pages in the court.

He said the statement contained his complete version about the issue. The statements of all the four accused were recorded and the case was adjourned for final arguments. All the accused denied having killed anybody. The accused said the judicial confession was recorded under duress. Javed Iqbal said he staged this "tragedy" to highlight the issue of runaway children of poor families who become victim of evil people. Regarding the whereabouts of the missing boys, the accused said it was the police's responsibility to find them.

He wrote on page No eight of the statement that the children disappeared due to the treatment by their families and were living with different people and 'surely' were compulsive homosexuals. He writes some children have returned to their homes but their parents are silent about it.

He said it is the responsibility of the police to find the children who are still missing. He said four people out of the presumed as missing could be proved to be alive. He said three of these children were his co-accused, Sajid, Sabir, and Nadeem, in the case. Another of them lived in Shadbagh and their photographs were among those of the hundred missing children.

He said he was told by one of his friends, Ishaq Billa, who died in police custody during investigation of the case, that the fourth boy was also one of the children. He said Ishaq's son could recognize the boy and he could be summoned by the court for confirmation of the fact.

Regarding the judicial confession said to have been recorded by them before a judicial magistrate and the fact they were warned that the confession could be used against them, the accused said they were under pressure from the police and feared they would be killed in a police encounter if they did not make a statement before the magistrate as directed by them.

They said they simply replied in affirmative to the suggestions made by the magistrate who read out a statement to them.

Javed Iqbal said fearing for his life he sent a letter to the army officials and a captain also visited the police station. He said initially he refused to make a statement and later an SP handed him a statement to read before the magistrate. He was taken again to the court where he replied to the magistrate's suggestions in "hun haan".

One of the accused said six people were present in the court during the recording of their confession and no policeman was there.

The court summoned on Thursday the Jang administration officer in person along with a video recording prepared by the Jang staff of the extra-judicial confession said to have been made by the accused at the newspaper's office before he was arrested from there.

Earlier, an application was moved to the effect by Javed Iqbal through his counsel Najeeb Faisal Chaudhry.

The special prosecutors, Muhammad Asghar Rokhari and Burhan Muazzam Malik, opposed the application saying the prosecution could not be forced to produce anything in evidence. They said they produced all the evidence they considered necessary. The defence counsel did not press his application. But the court said it was necessary to summon the video recording in view of the facts that came to light during the hearing of the case and the fact that the accused also said his statement complete interview was filmed at the Jang office.

About the acid-filled barrels drums recovered from his house, the accused said he had filled these with mobile oil and beef to mislead the police. He said he completed this job on Nov 22 and on the same day wrote five letters to higher officials.

He said Ishaq Billa helped him in placing the posters on wall and that the later was illiterate and could not read what was written on these charts. Javed Iqbal said in his statement that his memory was affected from an injury received in the head. He said he was involved by police in fake cases, money was extorted from his family and his friends were blackmailed.

He said he was beaten up by his servants and the police did not help in the case and he was involved in a fake sodomy case. He said he was operated upon five times but to no avail and during the process his house and car were sold, his business suffered badly, his mother became ill and feeling all alone in the world started visiting shrines and took recourse in religion. As to how the idea of staging the present drama came to his mind, he said it developed over a period of time when his friends were searching for the boy who had beaten him up and his aim was to highlight the issue of runaway children.

He said his friends - Murshid Naseem, Ashiq Husain and Ishaq Billa - had started looking after him during this difficult time. These days he thought about reforming the runaway children. The accused said one day his four friends decided to trace the boy who had injured him.

He said they would inquire from different children around the Minar-i-Pakistan about the boy. He said his friends brought home many such boys, fed them, gave them new clothes and inquired about the whereabouts of the boy. This continued for many months during which he visited many shrines.

He said Ishaq told him that he had gathered details of a number of boys during the search for the boy who had beaten him up. He said when he looked at the details he thought if problems of these boys could be solved.

The next day he bought Ishaq a camera and asked him to photograph the boys they brought home and write their whereabouts in detail. Javed Iqbal said he continued visiting shrines during this time while his friends partied in his house and he was fed up of paying the bills. He said his friends never cared about his weak financial condition and hundreds of thousands of rupees were spent in this way. Sentence given to child killer un-Islamic, says CII. The council quoted from Shariat and Ahadith to declare un-Islamic the sentence of cutting Javed Iqbal into pieces and throwing them in acid, passed by the sessions judge, Lahore.

Javed Iqbal was convicted of molesting and then murdering children in Lahore. The council said the verdict against Javed iqbal could create an impression inside and outside the country that it had been passed in keeping with Islamic injunctions, thus potentially giving rise to misunderstandings about the Shariat. It said there were categorical commandments in Islam for maintaining the dignity of a dead body, including that of a non-Muslim. In this connection, it said, that according to Ahadith, the Holy Prophet PBUH had commanded his followers to stand aside and let pass a funeral procession even of a non-Muslim.

It said the Holy Prophet PBUH had also asked his followers not to speak ill of the dead because they had already met their fate. The council said the cutting of a body into pieces was called "Masa'ala" in pre-Islamic terms and the Holy Prophet PBUH had strictly prohibited Muslims from undertaking this practice. Iqbal was awarded death sentence in on one hundred counts by a local court for murdering children and throwing their bodies in acid.

His accomplice, Sajid, also a condemned prisoner, was also found dead in separate cell. The jail authorities claim that the two had committed suicide.

But the circumstantial evidence and the condition of the two bodies belied the official claim. Detained in separate but adjacent cells in Block 7 of the jail, Javed, 40, and Sajid, 20, were found hanging at 5am, jail superintendent Mian Farooq told reporters. AIG prisons Abdussattar Ajiz claimed that the two prisoners had committed suicide sometime between 10pm and 2am when one Iftikhar Husain was on guard duty outside the cells.

He quoted the guard as having said: "I was asleep when the incident took place". Mr Ajiz said that the guard saw the two prisoners hanging with bedsheets tied to iron bars of the cells when he woke up. The guard untied knots of the bedsheets and laid the bodies on the floor to create an impression that they were asleep.

He did so to save his skin. Then he left at 2am without informing the authorities about the incident, he said. The AIG said that another official Liaquat Ali replaced the first guard who, too, did not bother to check the prisoners.

In the morning, he said, the head warden of the block found them dead when he woke them up. Police investigators, however, believed that committing suicide this way was not easy and especially when two people were doing so at the same time.

Senior jail officials, doctors, a magistrate and police rushed to the prison. The bodies were sent to the city mortuary for autopsy. Strangulation marks were found around the blood splashed necks of the two prisoners, doctors in the mortuary said. They said hands, feet and nails of the deceased had gone blue. They were bleeding from mouth and nostrils and tongue of one of them had a cut mark, the doctors said. An injury mark was also found around Sajid's neck, they said, adding that countless healed wounds inflicted with a blunt weapon were also found on all over the body of Javed Iqbal.

Nobody from Javed's family turned up to collect his body. His brothers Parvez Mughal and Saeed Mughal said that Javed had died for them the day he had confessed to killing children. Javed had made over dozen attempts to commit suicide, a jail official claimed while talking to reporters at the city mortuary.

Sometimes, he would demand fruit which was not available in market. He used to keep the jail staff engaged. Javed Iqbal was detained in the jail since he made a dramatic surrender at the office of an Urdu daily on Dec 30, The surrender brought an end to the country's biggest manhunt that was launched after Javed himself conveyed the details of his crime to the authorities in the last week of November, , through parcels filled with evidence and pictures of his victims.

Besides the parcels, the serial killer left two human skeletons in an acid-filled container at the house from where the police recovered at least nine bags carrying clothes and shoes of the victims.

The parcels also contained a personal diary and a notebook of the self-confessed killer giving each and every detail of his murder.

A letter bearing confessional statement of Javed was also attached with the parcels which read: "I had sexually assaulted children before killing them, and had disposed of their bodies in barrels of acid. Newsmen were the first to reach a three-room dingy house along Ravi Road which was pointed out in the letter.

The reporters and police found placards neatly pinned to the interior walls of the house giving details about the victims and how they were murdered. A placard read: "All details of the murders are contained in the diary and the page notebook that have been placed in the room and had also been sent to the authorities. This is my confessional statement.

The claim referring to committing suicide, however, turned fake when two accomplices of Javed were arrested from Sohawa while attempting to encash a traveller cheque and later when he himself surrendered. Families of almost all the children from all over the country identified their pictures, shoes and other evidence at the Ravi Road police station.

During investigation of the case, an accomplice Ishaq, alias Billa, of the killer died in the CIA custody when he reportedly jumped down from a window at the third floor of the CIA headquarters on Dec 7, As a punishment, the entire administration of the Lahore police was changed.

Hearing of the case started in the court of additional sessions judge Allah Bukhsh Ranjha on Feb 8, Javed and his accomplices were formally indicted on Feb 17, , and they all pleaded not guilty. During the proceedings, the serial killer kept on changing his statements, claiming sometime that the children were alive and saying that he had killed the boys in revenge to the "injustice meted out to him.

Javed was sentenced to death on counts on March 16, In the verdict, the judge said that Javed and his co-accused Sajid in the presence of the families of their victims be strangled with the same iron chain which they used as a weapon of offence, their bodies be cut into pieces and put into a drum containing acid as they did with those of the dead children.

Javed filed an appeal before the Lahore High Court against his death sentence. After being pending for many months, the LHC referred the appeal to the Shariat Court, saying that it did not fall in its jurisdiction.

In his diary and notebook, Javed had portrayed himself as a victim of "police system, irregularities in jail system in Pakistan and injustice in other sections of society. On 2 December, the Lahore police discovered human remains from two acid-filled containers in a house on Ravi Road following a letter sent by a man who claimed he had criminally assaulted boys and later dissolved their bodies in acid.

The fact came to light when the alleged assassin, Javed Iqbal Mughal, sent parcels to the Lahore Range DIG and a local newspaper containing pictures of the suspected victims and gory details of the killings. The killings were described as the 'crime of the century'. The exact motive remains uncertain but from the diary of the suspect it appears that he was himself once made the victim of a sexual assault and had committed the murders in retaliation.

Javed also claimed to have suffered trauma at the hands of the police - who refused to take action against his tormentors. His Ravi Road home had ten x-ray films of his skull showing head injuries and also several hospital receipts, and doctors' prescriptions.

The police also recovered clothes of the suspected victims and 86 pairs of shoes from the house where the alleged killer had affixed several placards on the wall narrating details about the killings. Initially, police officers contested the claim of the maniac regarding the number of victims. The belongings of the suspected victims were put on display at the Ravi Road police station and by the next morning the pictures, shoes and clothes of at least four boys had been identified by their distraught families.

For the next few days grief-stricken parents and relatives of missing children from as far as Sargodha, Jhang, Faisalabad, Multan, Toba Tek Singh, Peshawar and Mardan flocked to the police station. Till 11 December, the parents of 72 missing children had identified their pictures and belongings among those recovered from the psychopath's house. Several teams of police investigators were set up and in a few hours after the incident was unearthed the police took into custody Javed Iqbal's brothers and friends.

The police arrested nine people, who the serial killer claimed had assisted him in his heinous act of murdering the children and dissolving their bodies in acid. However, the investigations came to a halt with the death of one of the suspected co-accused, Muhammad Ishaq, in custody of the police. The attention of police investigators has now shifted from Javed Iqbal to saving the policemen in whose custody Ishaq died. To date police have not been able to find a clue which could lead to the arrest of the suspect.

A noteworthy aspect which came to light following the incident was that hundreds of children go missing in Lahore and other cities without any notice or news. At the same time law enforcing agencies remain busy in the service of the establishment and defending the status quo. Small wonder, Javed Iqbal, the alleged killer, could operate with such impunity his little extermination camp a stone's throw from a police station. This is now a symbol of all that is evil in the police department throughout the country.

Whether Javed was insane is not confirmed. The hint at suicide has not been accepted by the police, who believe he is still alive. In any case, the entire drama is a reflection both on the police and society. LAHORE, Oct Psychologists describe Javed Iqbal Mughal alias Kukri as a pampered child who developed bad habits in early age and later spent most of his life keeping a brigade of teenaged boys around him.

Since his teens when he owned a CC motorbike, Javed Iqbal had been using different ways to lure boys. He would spend thousands of rupees on sending them gifts like perfumes, tickets, coins etc. Other family members learnt about his bad habits when they also moved to Shadbagh but he would not allow them interfere in his life or speak against the boys accompanying him.

In late , a man filed a complaint against Javed Iqbal for sodomising his son. Shadbagh police detained his father and two brothers after their failure to arrest him. They remained in custody for seven days but Iqbal did not surrender. On the eighth day, one of his boys was arrested from his house and was detained at the police station. Within a few hours Iqbal surfaced and hurled abuses at his family members for allowing the police to arrest the boy. Later, he himself surrendered to secure the release of the boy.

For several years Iqbal resisted the efforts of his family to arrange his marriage. One day he stunned everybody by declaring that he had selected a bride for himself. She was the elder sister of one of his boys. The marriage which took place in lasted for a couple of months.

In an identical move, Iqbal married his youngest sister to one of his boys, Muhammad Iqbal. He was well aware of law and punishment. He had a habit of filing applications to various departments, complaining about one thing or the other.

He was once arrested and jailed for six months on charges of committing sodomy but it had no effect on his inclination towards boys. Once he assaulted the son of a respectable person of the Shadbagh. The matter was taken up by the elders of the area. He confessed to his crime before a panchayat at Gol Bagh. He signed a stamp paper, giving an undertaking that he would not do it again. Later, photocopies of the stamp paper were distributed in the area.

Shortly afterwards, his father died and there was nobody to stop the residents of Shadbagh to take him to the task. The next time he was caught, he was thrashed and ejected from Shadbagh.

Apart from his family business, everything Javed Iqbal did was aimed at luring boys. He opened a video games shop — the first of its kind in Shadbagh — and would offer tokens to boys at reduced rates and in some cases free of cost. He would throw a rupee note on the floor and watch the boy who would pick it up.

Then he would announce that his money had been stolen and he had to search everybody. When people stopped their children from visiting the shop, Iqbal set up a fish aquarium and later a gym, again to attract boys. He also set up an air-conditioned school Sunny Side School but it failed as nobody was willing to send children.

He also opened a fair-price shop where items of daily use were sold at a price lower than the market value. That too lasted for a few weeks. Following the death of his father in , Iqbal received a hefty share of Rs 3. He constructed a large house in Rana Town, Shahdara, in with a pond in the basement and a swimming pool in the backyard.

He loved moving around in style and was often seen driving in a five-door Pajero along with half a dozen boys. Javed Iqbal sold his Rana Town house and shifted to a new residence in Fatehgarh, Ghaziabad, and opened a video games shop there.

In September , Iqbal and his employee, Arbab, were severely beaten up by another employee and a masseur, and deprived of Rs 8, in cash. Iqbal sustained serious head injuries and remained unconscious at the Lahore General Hospital for 22 days.

He was arrested on release from the hospital. He was later granted bail by a local court. As no body in the family was willing to spend money on his treatment, his Ghaziabad house, car and shop were sold out and the money was used for his treatment. On getting better, he was shocked to find that his assets had been sold. On more than one occasions, he told his brothers that he had prepared a chemical which left a person reduced to a skeleton in minutes. Iqbal started his killing spree in May and himself leaked it to the press.

A few smiled shyly. Some seemed apprehensive. Did they know? Did they imagine that this fatherly little white-haired man who now sat in the courtroom, this man who lured them one at a time from the spice-scented city streets of Lahore in the Punjab region of Pakistan, meant to harm them? Or had they been on their own on the streets so long that they had learned not to expect anything but abuse and exploitation?

Was that what the judge was seeing in the eyes of the boys in the photos? Was it the unimaginable sadness of a child who knows with perfect certainty that nobody cares?

The judge looked down from his perch at the defendant. A hundred deaths would not be enough to punish Javed Iqbal and his three young accomplices for what they had done. Perhaps no penalty on earth could atone for the crime Javed had committed; luring young boys to his run-down flat during a brief five-month period, where he raped them, strangled them with an iron chain, and then dumped their bodies into a vat of acid.

Javed, it seemed to the judge, had not become the worst pedophile and serial murderer in recent Pakistani history. He had accomplices: the uncaring Pakistani population and an incompetent police force. Where in the law books would the judge find the penalty for that? It was in the deep and tragic eyes of the boys whose photos spilled out of the manila folder onto his desk. Speaking slowly in English, the official language of the Pakistani courts, the judge sentenced Javed to be strangled to death with the same chain he used to kill the children.

In the Market. The market square that surrounds the spectacular Mina-i-Pakistan --a monument to the struggles of the Muslims in the predominantly Hindu subcontinent -- is always teeming with throngs of tourists and with pilgrims making their way to the shrines that dot this city of seven million.

It was a place Javed felt comfortable. A paternal looking man in his mids with a shock of white hair and glasses, Javed would often wander through the markets. It was there, the twice-divorced father of two would later claim, that he collected teenage boys whom he took to his three-room flat on Ravi Road to work as his servants. Such arrangements are not uncommon in the subcontinent. Although the Koran strictly forbids homosexual relations and is even stricter when it comes to pedophilia, many older men regularly take young boys to be their lovers and servants.

Poems have been written about the love between a man and his servant. And while not usually discussed in polite company, the practice is generally understood and even accepted in other parts of both Pakistan and Afghanistan as well, the survey found.

Javed -- a man who identified himself variously as a journalist and a social worker -- steadfastly maintained that he was not cruising for sex on his regular forays to the market square, but was instead a desperately lonely man, looking for lonely boys to help him with his daily tasks. The teeming square, he would later say, was full of likely candidates.

They appeared, like so many of the throwaway children who gather in swarms around Lahore, to be sweet and vulnerable and desperate for someone to lend them a hand, he said. But he complained that some of them were brutal opportunists who exploited him.

In fact, he would later claim in his confession to police, it was an attack by some of the boys he had taken into his home that triggered his bloody killing spree. 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.

The price for her suffering and his was the deaths of children. They could easily be found in the market square that surrounds the minaret. A Beautiful Boy. His name was Ijaz, and he was a beautiful boy in a tattered white shirt with a Kara, an iron ring, around his ankle. Though no one seemed to know exactly how old he was, he appeared to be in his mid-teens.

Together with his younger brother, Riaz, Ijaz would spend his days with the small box of scented oils he had collected, offering massages to the men in the square.

It was a meager living. If he earned 20 rupees — the equivalent of about 40 U. In fact, he considered it a good week. They followed the man and his friends along the narrow streets that cut along the Ravi River to a small dark house that opened onto a courtyard.

Inside, there were three small rooms, each with foot ceilings to allow the sweltering Pakistani heat to rise. Though there were windows in the front room of the house, they let in little air, and even less light penetrated the thick iron grille that covered them.

Though grim, it hardly seemed an uncommonly dismal place in a city where most people live on the brink of destitution, and so, when Ijaz dismissed his brother, sending him home with instructions to meet him later, the younger boy easily agreed. As he left, he saw Ijaz lounging in the front room, wearing his tattered white shirt.

The truth was that Ijaz never left the house. The next time Riaz would see his brother, it was in a photograph. Ijaz was proudly wearing a blue shirt, given to him apparently by Javed, who snapped the photo moments before killing the boy. 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.

It would be, some have speculated, an effective way to persuade an otherwise street-smart kid to drop his guard. Or perhaps -- as he claimed in his confession and later retracted — he was carefully crafting an indictment not only against himself but against an entire society which could allow its children to simply vanish without so much as a raised eyebrow from the police or authorities. Once his chosen victim was too weak and groggy to resist, Javed would rape him.

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. 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. A Letter from a Killer.

Reporters were already there, stunned into silence by what they found. There were bloodstains on the walls and floor. Most of these children who are bonded laborers are Christians, and most become enslaved the same way Iqbal did, because of unpaid debt. Iqbal told us that children were often chained to the looms at night so they would not run away.

The same tools used to make carpets were often used to beat the children. He remained a slave for six years until he managed to run away to the Bonded Labor Liberation Front, a nonprofit run by one soft-spoken, courageous Pakistani who had no children of his own, Ehsan Ullah Khan. I stood there trying to make sense of what Paula was saying: that Iqbal was dead, and that maybe it was our fault.

He and Khan had come to the United States to receive the award and educate Americans about the awful plight of child labor. They visited schools and human rights groups, Iqbal spoke through a translator at an award ceremony with 2, people in attendance, appeared on TV and visited stores that sell Pakistani carpets.

Khan told me on the phone he was sure it was the carpet factory owners who had killed him. The official Pakistani story was absurd and disgusting they said Iqbal and his friends stumbled upon a man fornicating with a donkey and the man shot him , and no forensic evidence was ever found to substantiate the outlandish claims. I saw pictures of his dead body, his once animated and earnest face now completely silent, as he was laid to rest in a grave.