Two men had already been executed for his crimes by the time Abul Djabar was caught. It is the one detail that appears in every account of the case, and it is the most troubling: somewhere in the Afghan justice system of the 1960s, two people were convicted and put to death for murders committed by a man who was still free and still killing. Their names have never been published, and neither has any account of how they came to be accused.
The killings took place in and around Kabul through the 1960s and into 1970, in the reign of King Zahir Shah. The victims were young men and boys. According to the accounts that circulate, Djabar approached them with offers of help or company, raped them, and strangled them with his turban, which gave him the name he is still known by, the Turban Killer. No victim has been identified by name, and nothing is recorded of their ages, their families or where they were found.
He was caught near Kabul in October 1970, when police came upon him attacking another victim. No investigation had identified him beforehand. Under interrogation he confessed to sixty-five murders. A figure of more than three hundred is printed beside that number almost everywhere it appears, but it has never been tied to any count of the dead or the missing; sixty-five is what he admitted.
The case moved quickly after that. He was convicted of murder, sentenced to death and hanged on October 21, 1970, within weeks of his arrest. A photograph said to show the hanging has been widely reproduced.
Almost none of this rests on a primary document. The English-language account repeated in encyclopedias cites a 2009 Der Spiegel photo feature on Kabul in the late 1960s, a Vietnamese list of serial killers and a German website on serial murder. None of them cites an Afghan court judgment, a police file or a contemporary newspaper report. His name is spelled Abul Djabar, Abul Diabar and Abdul Jabbar. A birth date of July 11, 1921, which would have made him forty-nine when he died, comes from a user-created memorial page and has no documented origin.
What the surviving record cannot supply is what the case most needs: who the victims were, how many there really were, and who the two men were who died in his place.