In the last days of November 1999, a letter reached the police in Lahore, Pakistan. Its writer, Javed Iqbal, said he had killed 100 boys and destroyed their bodies in containers of acid. Time magazine quoted the letter a few weeks later: "I have killed 100 children, all boys." When police and reporters went into the small house he rented near Ravi Road, they found the remains of two bodies in acid, notices pinned to the walls, diaries and an album of photographs of boys, and bags of children's clothing and shoes.
Parents came to the Ravi Road police station to look through the clothes and pictures, and the families of most of the boys he had listed recognized their sons' belongings. Iqbal disappeared, and the hunt for him became one of the largest in Pakistan's history. On December 30, 1999, he walked into the Lahore office of an Urdu newspaper and gave himself up there, saying he feared for his life if he went to the police.
At his trial he denied everything. On March 16, 2000, a Lahore judge convicted him on 100 counts of murder and passed a sentence that drew criticism from the government, human rights lawyers and Pakistan's top religious advisory body: he was to be strangled in front of the parents, his body cut into 100 pieces and put in acid. The sentence was never carried out. On October 9, 2001, while his appeal was still waiting to be heard, Iqbal and a co-accused man were found dead in neighboring cells in Kot Lakhpat jail. Prison officials called it suicide. Doctors at the city mortuary found signs that both men had been strangled.
Because he died with his appeal pending, no appeal court ever ruled on his guilt. His conviction at trial is the only judgment against him.
Little is recorded about Iqbal's early life, and accounts do not agree on his age. Time described him in December 1999 as 42, twice divorced and the father of two. CBS News gave his age as 42 when he was sentenced in March 2000, and ARY News as 41. Dawn said he was 40 when he died in October 2001. The Encyclopaedia Britannica entry, written by the historian Philip Jenkins, gives his birth year only as "1961?" and says that little is known about his early life. His family name was Mughal: the Federal Shariat Court and Dawn both call him Javed Iqbal Mughal.
A long investigative report by the Turkish public broadcaster TRT World, based on interviews with his relatives, neighbors, lawyers and the prosecutor, describes a large Lahore family of five brothers and four sisters. His father, a nephew told TRT, owned a steel pipe business, and the family was comfortable by local standards. A brother described him as a violent and eccentric child. As an adult, TRT reported, he ran a metal workshop and a video game arcade staffed largely by young runaways, published a small magazine called Anti-Corruption in the early 1990s, and told people he had political connections.
Iqbal was accused of abusing boys long before 1999. Britannica records complaints of sodomy against him in 1985 and 1990 and notes that he was never convicted on any of them. Time reported that he had been arrested three times for molesting boys and that neighbors had forced him to make humiliating public apologies, after which he moved to another part of the city. TRT reported that neighbors regarded his conduct as an open secret and that, according to people it interviewed, he paid families and police to drop complaints. None of these earlier accusations led to a conviction.
In about September 1998, TRT reported, Iqbal was badly hurt in an attack by a teenager who worked for him; he was said to have spent about 20 days in a coma with a fractured skull and a broken jaw, and his businesses suffered. He then moved with his elderly mother to a smaller house near Ravi Road, and she died a few months later.
Iqbal himself gave a different account of what turned him. In his letter, the Associated Press reported, he said he had been wrongly arrested and badly beaten in police custody, and he described the killings as revenge against the police. Dawn reported in 2001 that his diary and notebook portrayed him as a victim of the police, of conditions in the jails and of injustice in Pakistani society. In an interview quoted by ARY News he said that his mother had cried for him and that he wanted 100 mothers to cry for their children. TRT quoted his diary in similar words. Britannica likewise records that he described the crimes as revenge against police who, he said, had assaulted him after an arrest.
According to TRT, the first letter claiming 100 killings reached the Lahore police in late November 1999, sent from Iqbal's own address. A police deputy superintendent went to the house with constables, TRT reported, but Iqbal threatened to kill himself with his licensed gun, and the officers left without searching the house; the officer later told his superiors that Iqbal could not be the killer of a hundred children. Dawn reported that in late November Iqbal sent parcels to the authorities and to a newspaper containing evidence, a confession and details of the killings.
The newspaper was the Urdu daily Jang. Its editor, Jamil Chishti, told TRT that when the letter and photographs of boys arrived he had considered two possibilities: that someone was framing Iqbal, or that the confession was real. Jang journalists went to the house and found it abandoned. Jang published the story on December 3, 1999, with photographs of 57 boys, TRT reported.
Time summarized what the letter said. If it was genuine, the killings had begun in June 1999, and on some days two or three boys were killed, with help from accomplices whom the letter did not name. The letter, according to the Associated Press, described how the children were killed and their remains destroyed, and the AP reported that they had apparently been sexually abused. Iqbal threatened to kill himself, and for some weeks it was not known whether he was alive.
The official record of the investigation begins on December 2, 1999. The Federal Shariat Court's 2007 judgment summarizes the prosecution case: the house, which had been locked for days and gave off a strong smell, was entered that day by the station house officer of Ravi Road police station. The police registered a first information report, No. 316 of 1999, the same day.
Inside, the judgment records, were posters said to have been written by Iqbal, drums containing remains in acid, an iron ring and chains, syringes, the clothing of children and dozens of household articles. Police seized two diaries, one listing the names and addresses of children and the other recording the killings, and an album of 57 photographs with writing on the back. On December 3, the judgment says, remains were taken from the drums and sent for medical examination, and parents and relatives began identifying clothing and other belongings at the police station.
Contemporary reports add detail. Time described a dark, run-down three-room house with confessional statements tacked to its walls, bags of shoes and clothes, and two skeletons in vats of acid. On the back of each photograph, Time reported, were the boy's name, his father's name, where he lived, the date of his death and a victim number. The Associated Press reported a blue vat holding the remains of two bodies, photographs of 100 children and the victims' clothing. Dawn reported at least nine bags of clothing and shoes. TRT reported that the medical examiner judged the recovered remains to be those of boys aged about 13 to 17, and that no DNA testing was done; Pakistan's first DNA laboratory did not open until 2006.
No other bodies were ever found. The Associated Press, CBS News and Dawn all reported that the remains of two bodies were the only remains recovered.
The boys named in Iqbal's records came, according to the Associated Press, mostly from the city's poorest families. Some were beggars, some earned a living on the streets, and some had run away from home and never returned. In his confession, as Dawn reported it, Iqbal said that he and his accomplices lured teenage boys from the shrine of Data Sahib and from other such places, to the house near Ravi Road. Time gave the boys' ages as 9 to 18; Britannica and ARY News give 6 to 16.
Time reported that relatives had identified clothing and snapshots of 72 boys by late December 1999, and that the parents of only 25 had ever reported their sons missing. Many poor families, Time wrote, distrusted the police and felt they had nowhere to go. One mother told the magazine that it had never occurred to her to ask the police for help.
Time described two of the families. Muhammed Ahmed was 12 and had been missing for more than six weeks when his mother found his shirt among the clothes at the police station and concluded that he was dead. She was raising six children on about $40 a month. Kamran Shaukat was 14. His mother told Time that no one knew the pain she was going through and that nothing was being done because the family was poor.
TRT later spoke to families of other boys. Among the missing it named were Faisal Razzaq, who was 9 and disappeared on July 9, 1999; Shakeel Hassan, 13; Faraz Khan; Tasleem Ullah; Abdul Majeed; Zeeshan Nazir; Dilawar Hussain; and Ejaz Muhammad, known as Kaka, who was last seen at Minar-e-Pakistan in October 1999.
The number of boys identified grew as more families came forward. ARY News later reported that more than 80 had been identified by relatives from photographs or clothing, and Dawn wrote in 2001 that the families of almost all of the 100 children had identified their belongings. Those identifications were of photographs and possessions; the remains of only two bodies were ever recovered, and whose they were has never been reported.
Families crowded the courtyard of the Ravi Road police station, where clothing and sandals had been laid out for them to search, Time reported. Police offered rewards but could not find Iqbal. The Associated Press called the search one of the biggest manhunts in the country's history; police detained and questioned a number of people, among them several of Iqbal's relatives.
The investigation was already under criticism when a man held in connection with it died. Ishaq, known as Billa, was described by The Irish Times as a key suspect who was being questioned about his alleged role in the killings. On December 7, 1999, Dawn reported, he died in the custody of the police Crime Investigation Agency (CIA) after reportedly jumping from a third-floor window of its Lahore headquarters. The Irish Times reported that two senior police officers were moved from their posts immediately afterward, and Dawn later wrote that the whole Lahore police administration was reshuffled as a result. TRT reported that an inquiry found he had been tortured and that officers were suspended. No criminal case over his death was reported.
Time noted that Pakistani newspapers ran editorials condemning society's silence about the sexual abuse of children and the failures of the police. It placed the case against the background of Lahore's rapid growth, poverty and unemployment; the city's population had more than doubled since 1981.
Two young men linked to Iqbal were picked up first. According to the Federal Shariat Court, one of them was arrested on December 30, 1999, while trying to cash a traveler's check issued by Iqbal, together with Shehzad, known as Sajid. ARY News reported that two alleged accomplices were caught at Sohawa trying to cash his traveler's checks, and that Iqbal's own surrender came hours later. The Associated Press said the two were arrested at a bank while cashing a check made out to Iqbal.
On December 30, 1999, Iqbal walked into the Lahore office of the Urdu daily Jang and said he wanted to surrender, according to Dawn, the AP report carried by CBS News, and ARY News. TRT, drawing on the paper's own staff, gave the date as December 29 and said Iqbal announced himself as the killer of 100 children; his interview with Jang journalists was recorded and later used as evidence. The Associated Press reported that he refused to go to the police directly because he feared for his life. ARY News reported that newspaper staff alerted the military authorities, who sent more than 100 soldiers to surround the building. Pakistan then had an army-led government, as the Associated Press described it.
Three people were tried with Iqbal, by the account of the Federal Shariat Court, CBS News and TRT. One was Sajid, also recorded as Shehzad and Guddu, who was about 20 at his death in 2001, according to Dawn. Two others were boys: the appeal court found that both were minors when they were arrested and tried, and noted that they had been brought before the trial court in handcuffs. One of them was described by a witness as no more than 9 or 10 and gave his own age as 14; the other was described as 13 or 14.
The second boy was arrested on January 11, 2000. The case against the two boys rested largely on confessions recorded by a magistrate after days in police custody, together with a rickshaw driver who said he had been hired to carry containers of chemicals and a property dealer who linked one boy to the renting of the house.
The trial opened before Additional Sessions Judge Allah Bakhsh Ranjha in Lahore on February 8, 2000, Dawn reported. Iqbal and his co-accused were formally charged on February 17 and pleaded not guilty. The prosecution, led by the special prosecutor Burhan Moazzam, called more than 100 witnesses; the Federal Shariat Court counted 105 prosecution witnesses in the trial record.
Iqbal's position shifted during the trial. Dawn reported that at times he claimed the children were alive and at other times said he had killed them to avenge the injustice done to him. TRT reported that he retracted his confession and claimed the whole affair had been staged to draw attention to the problem of runaway children; his defense lawyer, Faisal Najeeb, asked why no neighbors had heard anything. Moazzam told TRT that Iqbal was manipulative and theatrical in court. Throughout the trial, the Associated Press reported, parents of the missing children kept a vigil outside the courtroom, shouting at Iqbal and demanding that he be sentenced to death.
On March 16, 2000, Judge Ranjha convicted Iqbal. The Federal Shariat Court's judgment sets out the trial court's findings: Iqbal was convicted on 100 counts of murder under section 302-A of the Pakistan Penal Code, as qisas, and on 100 counts of causing disappearance of evidence under section 201, with seven years' rigorous imprisonment on each, 700 years in all. Sajid was convicted on 98 counts of murder and 98 counts under section 201. The two boys were convicted of lesser offenses and given prison terms.
The judge sentenced Iqbal to death and directed how it was to be done. He was to be strangled with the same iron chain, in front of the victims' parents, and his body was to be cut into 100 pieces and put into acid. The AP quoted the judge: "You will be strangled to death in front of the parents whose children you killed." The AP report printed by The Tribune of Chandigarh said the execution was to be carried out in public in a Lahore park; TRT said the judge named Minar-e-Pakistan. The same direction was given for Sajid, according to Dawn.
CBS News reported that Iqbal declared his innocence in court and later told reporters that he had killed no one, and that his lawyer planned to appeal.
The form of the sentence was condemned within days. Interior Minister Moinuddin Haider said the government would challenge it, CBS News reported, because such a punishment was not permitted under the human rights convention Pakistan had signed. The human rights lawyer Asma Jahangir called the sentence "barbaric" and said it stirred fascist instincts in society. Public executions were rare in Pakistan, where death sentences were normally carried out by hanging inside jails.
On March 27, 2000, the Associated Press reported, the state-run Council of Islamic Ideology ruled that the sentence "violates the tenets of Islam," because Islamic teaching forbids desecrating a body. Even the prosecutor, Moazzam, later told TRT that the direction breached human rights law.
Iqbal appealed to the Lahore High Court. Dawn reported in 2001 that the High Court, after many months, sent the appeal to the Federal Shariat Court, ruling that the case lay outside its jurisdiction; in 2007 Dawn explained that the High Court had declined to hear it because it raised issues under the Hudood laws. The appeals of the two boys were lodged with the Federal Shariat Court on August 30, 2001. When Iqbal died in October 2001, his appeal had not been heard.
At five in the morning on Tuesday, October 9, 2001, Iqbal and Sajid were found hanging in adjacent cells in Block 7 of Kot Lakhpat jail, Lahore, where both were held as condemned prisoners. Dawn reported the account given by prison officials. The jail authorities said the two men had hanged themselves with bedsheets between 10 p.m. and 2 a.m. The Assistant Inspector General of Prisons said the guard on duty had been asleep; when he woke, he untied the sheets, laid the bodies on the floor and left at 2 a.m. without telling anyone. The guard who replaced him did not check the prisoners, and the head warden found them dead in the morning. A jail official said Iqbal had made more than a dozen attempts at suicide and had behaved oddly, demanding milk at midnight or fruit that was not in season.
Police investigators doubted that two men could easily hang themselves at the same time, Dawn reported. Doctors at the city mortuary recorded strangulation marks and other injuries on both bodies. Gulf News reported that mortuary sources, citing the first autopsy findings, said the two men had been strangled rather than hanged, and that Iqbal's body bore injuries beyond the strangulation mark. A board of doctors had carried out the autopsies but had not yet reported. Gulf News also reported that Iqbal had written to various people and organizations alleging torture by jail staff and saying he was being encouraged to kill himself.
Britannica states that, despite indications of foul play, the deaths were officially ruled suicides. TRT reported that Iqbal's lawyer and family suspected the police of killing him, believing he had wanted to name senior officials. The findings of the medical board, or of any later inquiry, were not reported.
Iqbal's brothers refused to claim his body and said they had disowned him, Dawn reported. Sajid's family did not come for his. Gulf News reported that both men were buried at night in a graveyard near the jail, with only jail officials, police and a few passersby present; the imam of the jail colony mosque led the prayers, and the burial was filmed for the jail record.
The appeals of the two boys were heard by the Federal Shariat Court in Lahore in February 2006, and a bench of Chief Justice Haziqul Khairi and Justice Muhammad Zafar Yasin gave judgment in April 2007. Asma Jahangir, who had condemned Iqbal's sentence seven years earlier, appeared for the boys.
The court acquitted both. It found that one boy's confession had been recorded 13 days after his arrest without explanation; the state's own lawyer conceded that it had no value as evidence. It found that the other boy's confessions were neither voluntary nor free from coercion. Both boys had retracted their statements at trial. The court also criticized the trial record, calling the questionnaire put to the accused under section 342 "a mockery in the eyes of law." It set aside the trial court's judgment as to the two appellants and ordered their release unless they were held in another case. It held that the Juvenile Justice System Ordinance, 2000, did not apply because their case had been decided before that law came into force.
As to Iqbal and Sajid, the court recorded that their appeals had "become infructuous" because both had died in jail while the appeals were pending. It did not decide whether the evidence proved their guilt. It did address the trial judge's direction, holding it "against the teachings of Islam," a violation of the Pakistan Prison Rules and "perverse"; Dawn reported the bench's view that the sentence therefore had no legal effect.
Javed Iqbal was convicted at trial in Lahore on March 16, 2000, of 100 murders and sentenced to death. He appealed, and he died in custody on October 9, 2001, before the appeal was heard. The Federal Shariat Court did not review the evidence against him, recording only that his appeal had lapsed with his death, and it held the form of his sentence unlawful. His conviction therefore never became final: he was convicted at trial and died while his appeal was pending. The two boys tried with him were acquitted on appeal in 2007.
The number of victims. The trial court convicted Iqbal on 100 counts of murder, and 100 is the number he claimed in his letter. Physical remains of only two bodies were recovered. The other counts rested on his writings, his photographs and records, the clothing found at the house, and the identifications made by families. Time reported 72 boys identified by late December 1999; ARY News later reported more than 80. Dawn's 2007 report of the appeal hearing recorded defense counsel's argument that the prosecution's account of bodies dissolved in acid was questionable, and TRT noted that the victims were never all conclusively identified. No appeal court ever weighed the evidence.
His confession and its retraction. Iqbal confessed in writing and to Jang journalists, then told the court and reporters that he had killed no one, and at times said the children were alive. His brother and his lawyer told TRT they believed he killed no one; the prosecutor, Moazzam, told TRT he believed Iqbal had killed more than 100.
Accomplices. His letter said others helped him. Sajid was convicted at trial and died before his appeal was heard. The two boys were acquitted because their confessions were found to be coerced or of no value. Ishaq, called Billa, died in police custody before any charge was tested.
The dates. Iqbal's records, as reported, put the killings in the second half of 1999. Time wrote that, if the letter was genuine, they began in June; TRT gave July to December; the Federal Shariat Court case summary reported by Dawn gave August 20 to November 13, 1999.
His death. Officials said both men hanged themselves; mortuary doctors and investigators doubted it; ARY News reported that he died of poisoning. The result of any official inquiry has not been made public in the reports.
In 2022 the director and writer Abu Aleeha completed a feature film about the investigation, starring Yasir Hussain as Iqbal and Ayesha Omar as a police officer who questions him. Titled Javed Iqbal: The Untold Story of a Serial Killer, it premiered in Karachi on January 25, 2022, and was due to open across the country on January 28. Dawn Images reported that the Punjab government stopped its release in that province despite censor approval; the producers said they would go to the Lahore High Court and would not release the film anywhere until the case was settled. Arab News reported that the Central Board of Film Censors also refused it. The film won best actor and best director awards at the UK Asian Film Festival in May 2022 and was selected for the DC South Asian Film Festival in Washington that November.
In March 2023, Arab News reported, the film was renamed Kukri after the censors said the original title could seem to glorify its subject, and a closing message explaining the film's purpose was added. Arab News said Kukri was also the title of Aleeha's novel about the case and a name Iqbal was known by among acquaintances; Daily Pakistan quoted Aleeha as saying the name referred to Iqbal's unusual way of sitting. After censor clearance in April 2023, the film opened in cinemas in June 2023, Daily Pakistan reported.
1985 and 1990: Complaints of sodomy lodged against Iqbal; no conviction (Britannica).
About September 1998: Iqbal badly injured in an attack, according to TRT; later moves with his mother to a house near Ravi Road, Lahore.
June to November 1999: Period of the killings described in his records, as variously reported.
Late November 1999: Letter claiming 100 killings reaches Lahore police; parcels with a confession and photographs reach the police and the newspaper Jang.
December 2, 1999: Police enter the house near Ravi Road and register a first information report.
December 3, 1999: Remains sent for examination; families begin identifying clothing; Jang publishes the story.
December 7, 1999: Ishaq, known as Billa, dies in police custody after a fall from a third-floor window.
December 30, 1999: Two men are arrested trying to cash Iqbal's traveler's checks; Iqbal surrenders at Jang's Lahore office.
January 11, 2000: The second juvenile co-accused is arrested.
February 8, 2000: Trial opens before Additional Sessions Judge Allah Bakhsh Ranjha.
February 17, 2000: The accused are formally charged and plead not guilty.
March 16, 2000: Iqbal convicted on 100 counts and sentenced to death and 700 years' imprisonment.
March 27, 2000: Council of Islamic Ideology rules the form of the sentence contrary to Islam.
2000 to 2001: Lahore High Court sends Iqbal's appeal to the Federal Shariat Court.
August 30, 2001: Juvenile co-accused's appeals lodged at the Federal Shariat Court.
October 9, 2001: Iqbal and Sajid found dead in their cells at Kot Lakhpat jail; officially ruled suicide.
April 2007: Federal Shariat Court acquits the two juvenile co-accused and records Iqbal's and Sajid's appeals as infructuous.
January 2022: Film about the case premieres in Karachi; its release is halted.
June 2023: The film, renamed Kukri, opens in Pakistani cinemas.