Abul Djabar killed young men and boys in the Kabul region of Afghanistan through the 1960s and into 1970. He approached them with offers of help or company, raped them, and strangled them with the turban he was wearing. The method was distinctive enough to give him the name the press used, the turban killer.
He is one of the very few people in this archive whose case is documented almost entirely at second hand. The Afghan record from 1970 is not available in the sources reachable here, and what circulates is a short account repeated across encyclopaedias in several languages. The figures and dates below should be read with that in mind.
Two men were executed for murders he had committed. They were convicted before he was caught, and their innocence became apparent only afterwards. That is the fact worth taking from this case, and it is stated in every account of it.
He was caught in October 1970, near Kabul, when police interrupted him attacking another victim. He had not been identified by any investigation. Under interrogation he confessed to sixty-five murders.
He was suspected of more than three hundred. That larger figure appears in every account and is untested; the sixty-five is what he admitted to. The two are kept apart here.
The killings ran through the reign of Zahir Shah, a period usually described as one of relative stability in Afghanistan, and the disappearance of that many boys and young men over roughly a decade went unconnected by any central record.
He was tried in a Kabul court, convicted and sentenced to death, and hanged on October 21, 1970. A photograph of the hanging circulates.
A genealogical database gives his birth as July 11, 1921, which would make him forty-nine at his death. No better source for it has been found, and it should be treated as uncertain.
He is a different man from Abdullah Shah, also Afghan and also in this archive, who killed at least twenty travellers on the Kabul to Jalalabad road while serving under the warlord Zardad Khan and was shot in 2004.