The women were old, they lived alone in villages, and they were wearing everything they owned. In rural Punjab a woman’s gold is her property and she keeps it on her body rather than in a box.
Muhammad Yousaf, son of Muhammad Sharif, came originally from Rana Colony in Gujranwala and was living in a rented house at Adalatgarha, near Sialkot city. He was unmarried. The police described him as mentally sound.
His approach was to offer them money, in some accounts posing as a government or charity worker with zakat or aid to hand out. Then he robbed them and killed them, with bricks, stones and blunt weapons or by strangling them, in several cases in daylight while the rest of the household was out at work. The district police officer said all the dead were between sixty-five and seventy-five.
Between June and September 2010 the killings piled up across the district, unsolved, and the police called them blind murders. They caused real fear. Plainclothes officers were put on the General Bus Stand and other public places.
Two things ended it. A woman named Khursheeda Bibi, from Christian Town, was badly hurt by him and lived, and what she told the police from her hospital bed helped them find him. And on September 21, 2010 officers stopped him on the road near Pakka Garha, in the Muradpur police area, with an elderly woman on the back of his motorcycle. He was taking her away to kill her.
At the press conference the following day, the district police officer, Bilal Siddique Kamyana, read out the names of the women they had identified.
Amina Bibi of Narowal. Salima Bibi of Adalatgarha. Salima Bibi of Kamanala. Salima Akhtar of Mohallah Mubarikpura. Rasool Bibi of Bhabrianwala. Amina Bibi and Khursheed Begum, both of Pakka Garha. Razia Begum of Mujahid Road. Roshan Bibi of Kotli Loharan.
Three more women had been killed and had not been identified. Cases against him were registered at six police stations: Cant, Kotwali, Uggoki, Muradpur, Motra and Sialkot Sadr.
The prosecution’s case was that his confession had led police to the stolen jewelry and cash, that the victims’ families had identified the pieces, that forensic evidence placed him at the scenes, that his car had been recorded in the areas where women went missing, and that the woman who escaped gave evidence against him.
His defense argued that the confession had been forced and was inadmissible under Article 14 of the Qanun-e-Shahadat, which requires a confession to be made freely before a magistrate. It argued that the jewelry identification proved nothing, because poor villagers owned the same few designs. And it argued that the prosecution had a single eyewitness, the survivor, whose account in court did not match what the police had written down at the time.
District and Sessions Judge Manzoor Hussain Dogar found him guilty of thirteen murders under section 302 of the Pakistan Penal Code, and of robbery and kidnapping, and sentenced him to death on June 15, 2011.
Under Pakistani procedure a death sentence passed by a sessions court must be confirmed by the High Court, and the case went to the Lahore High Court for that purpose. No report of its decision, or of an execution, has been published. Pakistan's use of the death penalty has been intermittent since, with a moratorium lifted in December 2014.
A second man is easily confused with him. Yousaf Mughal, described as a Gujranwala-based serial killer living in a rented house at Adalatgarha-Uggoki, was arrested in Sialkot in 2012, sentenced to death in January 2013 for the murder of a seventy-year-old woman, Razia Bibi of Muradpur, after robbing her of gold, and confessed to killing twenty-two more elderly women in the district over five years. The method, the district and even the village are nearly the same, and one legal summary written later gives an arrest year of 2007 and a count of twenty-seven that belong to neither account. The court record for Muhammad Yousaf is the 2011 conviction for thirteen.