At about a quarter to four on the morning of Tuesday, July 19, 2005, a private watchman named Abdul Wakil Khan was walking his rounds through Kasira Bazar, in the Rang Mahal quarter of Lahore's Walled City. Ahead of him, a man lifted a heavy stone and brought it down on the head of someone asleep outside a shop. The sleeper was Ishtiqa, known as Bala Sain, a mentally ill man who lived on the street. Khan seized the attacker by the arm and shouted "killer, killer," but the man tore free and ran, and plainclothes policemen joined the chase. Ahsan Khan, who lived nearby, heard the screaming, came out of his house with his brother, and grabbed the running man near the Azam Cloth Market. They handed him over at the Rang Mahal police station, and Ishtiqa was taken to Mayo Hospital in critical condition. The papers could not agree on how to spell the names, Wakil or Wakeel, Ishtiqa or Ishtiaq, but they agreed on what the watchman had caught.
For three weeks, men sleeping on Lahore's sidewalks and green belts had been found with their heads crushed, and the papers had named the man they could not find the brick killer. (Reuters dated the first killing to June 28, the Daily Times to June 20.) Reuters wrote of fear and panic among the city's 200,000 homeless. Now he had a name, Amir Qayyum, and an age, twenty-four, and by the police account a confession: sixteen attacks, fourteen dead, two badly hurt. Stones of ten to thirty-five kilograms had been found at every scene. The city superintendent, Dr. Usman Anwar, walked reporters through Qayyum's last night of freedom as the police reconstructed it. At about eleven on the night of Monday, July 18, near the United Christian Hospital, he saw a man asleep on the footpath and tried to lift a large stone, but it was chained down, so he left. He ate at a roadside hotel at Kalma Chowk, walked toward Nasserabad, and at about half past two killed another sleeping man there with a stone, then took a wagon to the Rang Mahal area. The reports did not name him. The police said Qayyum stripped his victims of anything that could identify them.
The only portrait of him came from the police, and it was bleak. The senior superintendent for operations, Aamir Zulfiqar, told reporters that his family had abandoned him as a child and that he had lived with a maternal uncle, Dr. Shahid, who was murdered with a friend, a police inspector named Khwaja Rizwan, on September 25, 2003; that his father was blind; that he had been expelled from school for violence; and that his brother and five sisters had thrown him out of the house because he beat them. He was a drug addict with an arrest a year earlier, living in a rented room in Shadbagh and washing cars at Liberty Market; on his last day of freedom he had earned 130 rupees and spent fifteen of them on dinner. His motive, as he gave it to them, was revenge on society for his uncle's murder, which had scattered his family. A suspect in the uncle's killing, Hafiz Abid, had been arrested in February 2004 and died in a police van; the police said he took a gun from a sleeping constable and shot himself, though, the Daily Times noted, his hands had been cuffed behind his back. Asked why he used stones, Qayyum is reported to have said: "When such free weapons are available on the road, why spend money?"
The police called him a psychopath and a cold-blooded killer who played cricket after a murder, said bloodstained clothes from his house had been sent for DNA testing, and refused to have him psychologically evaluated. One senior officer said an assessment might help him plead insanity. Psychiatrists at Fatima Jinnah Medical College told the Daily Times that an evaluation mattered, among other reasons, to establish whether he had committed the killings at all or had been forced by the police to confess. Lahore had been through a similar series the year before: Reuters reported that fifteen homeless people were killed with bricks in 2004, that three men were arrested, that one of them confessed to eleven killings and was sentenced to death, and that the other two were released for lack of evidence.
Qayyum was tried before an anti-terrorism court in Lahore, which on May 10, 2006, convicted him of one murder and sentenced him to death, at twenty-five. He was charged with twelve further killings, on which verdicts were expected the following week; the fourteenth death was not before the court because, officials told the BBC, the body was untraceable. No later outcome of those charges, and no execution, has been found reported.
September 25, 2003: Qayyum's maternal uncle, Dr. Shahid, is murdered with a police inspector, Khwaja Rizwan.
June 2005: the first of the brick killings of sleeping homeless men in Lahore; Reuters dates it to June 28, the Daily Times to June 20.
Night of July 18, 2005: by the police reconstruction, he kills a sleeping man near Nasserabad.
July 19, 2005: a watchman sees him bring a stone down on Ishtiqa, a man asleep in Kasira Bazar, and he is caught and handed to police.
May 10, 2006: an anti-terrorism court in Lahore convicts him of one murder and sentences him to death.