On the night of February 9, 2003, plainclothes police in Ahmedpur East, in the Bahawalpur district of southern Punjab, arrested a man they found assaulting a mentally ill woman in a graveyard near Abbasia Chowk. At a press conference five days later the senior superintendent, Sikandar Hayat, presented him as the killer behind the unexplained deaths of elderly women in a village of the area over the previous two years. His name was Abdul Razzaq. In front of the reporters he said he had raped eight women and strangled them when they resisted, that he had done the same in other cities he would not name, and that he was ready for any punishment.
The police described a drifter and an addict. He was Seraiki-speaking, said he came from the Abbasi family and could speak Arabic, and had separated from his wife, Zubaida, eight years earlier; he had been living with his sister, Ghulam Jannat, in the Qureshabad neighborhood of Ahmedpur East. He had spent time in Karachi looking for work, the police said, and on a visit to Multan during Ramadan had assaulted women at shrines. Under interrogation by a team led by Deputy Superintendent Mahmood Ahmed he identified three shrines, in Multan, Lodhran and Makhdoom Rashid, where he said he had raped elderly women without killing them.
Within days the police account ran into a problem. The medical superintendent of the tehsil hospital, Dr. Mohammad Baqar Khan, told the Daily Times that in all five chemical examiner's reports on the dead women no semen had been detected, and that the postmortems had found no marks of violence on the five bodies. What the court made of that discrepancy was not reported.
He was tried before the Anti-Terrorism Court in Bahawalpur. The prosecution said he had abducted, raped and murdered seven elderly women, and the victims named in the reports of the verdict include Jiwan Bibi, Sakina and Manzoor Bibi. On April 6, 2006, the presiding officer, Muhammad Akram Khan, convicted him in six of the murder cases, acquitted him in the seventh, and sentenced him to death on twelve counts and to forty-two years' imprisonment. Officials said he had confessed to killing eight women after raping them. Reports at the time gave his age as forty-five.
Pakistan halted executions from 2008 until late 2014 and resumed them afterward. No report of his execution, or of the outcome of any appeal, has been found.