Javed Iqbal was born in Lahore on October 8, 1956, one of a large and comfortable family, and ran a succession of small businesses, including a steel recasting works and a video game arcade. He had been accused of sodomy involving boys more than once in the 1990s, and the cases went nowhere; he claimed afterwards that police had beaten him badly over one of them, and that his mother died while he was recovering, and that this was why he did what he did.
Between roughly June 1998 and December 1999 he killed a hundred boys, aged between six and sixteen, at a house on Ravi Road. He was known as Kukri.
Almost all of them were runaways, beggars and street children in a city with a great many of them and no system for noticing when one stopped appearing. He drugged them, strangled them, cut up the bodies and dissolved them in vats of hydrochloric acid, and poured the residue into a drain that fed the Ravi river.
He kept a record. Each boy's photograph was in an album, and the clothes and shoes of all hundred were in bags in the room. He wrote a diary of it.
And at the end of it he wrote the whole thing out and posted it to the Lahore newspaper Jang and to the police, along with a plan of the house, and left a note on the door of the room saying the bodies in the drums were not to be removed but given a decent burial. Police who forced the door on December 2, 1999 found two vats, the albums, the clothing and the smell.
He evaded a national manhunt for a month and then walked into the offices of Jang on December 30, 1999 and gave himself up to journalists, saying he did not trust the police to keep him alive.
He alternately confessed and retracted, at one point claiming the whole thing was a hoax designed to expose how little anyone cared about missing street children.
He was convicted on March 16, 2000. The judge, applying a principle of retribution in kind, sentenced him to be strangled a hundred times, cut into a hundred pieces and dissolved in acid, in front of the victims' parents. The sentence attracted international condemnation, had no basis in Pakistani law, and was never going to be carried out.
On October 8, 2001, his forty-fifth birthday, he and his teenage co-accused Sajid Ahmad were found dead in their cell at Kot Lakhpat jail. The official finding was suicide. It has been widely doubted.
The hoax claim was false, and the reason he could make it at all is the part worth keeping. A hundred boys went missing from one city over eighteen months and the record of it was assembled by the man who killed them, because nobody else was keeping one.