In December 1999 a letter reached the Lahore police and Khawar Naeem Hashmi, chief news editor of a Lahore newspaper. Its writer, Javed Iqbal, confessed to raping and murdering a hundred boys between six and sixteen, most of them runaways and orphans living on the city's streets. He wrote that he had strangled them, cut them up, and dissolved the bodies in vats of hydrochloric acid, which he had emptied into a river. Now, he wrote, he meant to drown himself in the Ravi.
At his house the police and reporters found bloodstains on the walls and floor, the chain he said he had used to strangle the boys, and photographs of many of them in plastic bags, each labeled by hand with a name and an age. Two vats of acid still held partly dissolved remains, left, a note said, so that the authorities would find them. The police dragged the Ravi with nets and found nothing, and the country's largest manhunt began. Four teenage boys who had shared his flat were arrested at Sohawa; within days one of them died in police custody, and though the police said he had jumped from a window, a post-mortem suggested force had been used.
Iqbal was the sixth of eight children of a businessman in Lahore, and while still a student in 1978 he had started a steel recasting business. His explanation for the killings went back to the 1990s, when he was arrested over an act of sodomy against a young runaway. The boy had beaten him badly about the head, no charges followed, and his mother, he said, had watched his decline and died of a heart attack. He resolved, he said, to make a hundred mothers cry for their sons as his own mother had cried for him.
A month after the letter, on December 30, 1999, he walked into the offices of the Daily Jang and gave himself up to the journalists there, saying he feared the police would kill him. In March 2000 he was convicted and sentenced to death. The judge's words were widely reported: "You will be strangled to death in front of the parents whose children you killed, your body will then be cut into 100 pieces and put in acid, the same way you killed the children." The interior minister, Moinuddin Haider, said such punishments were not allowed.
In October 2001 Iqbal and an accomplice, Sajid Ahmed, were found dead in their cells at Kot Lakhpat jail in Lahore. The official finding was that they had hanged themselves with their bedsheets; the autopsies found they had been beaten before they died. The date is given as October 8, his birthday in some accounts, and as October 9. His birth year is given as 1956 and as 1961. No one claimed his body. A film about the case, due out in January 2022, was banned a day before its release and reached cinemas in June 2023.