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Javed Iqbal, Condemned for Killing 100 Children in Lahore, Found Dead in His Cell

Jail officials said Iqbal and his young accomplice took their own lives on the same night. Doctors and police investigators doubted that account.

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Javed Iqbal, in glasses and a patterned sweater, surrounded by police officers after his 1999 surrender

Javed Iqbal never faced the death sentence a Lahore court gave him for murdering 100 children. On October 9, 2001, he and his accomplice were found dead in their cells.

Iqbal, 40, and Sajid, 20, also a condemned prisoner, were found at about 5 a.m. in separate but adjacent cells in Block 7 of Kot Lakhpat Jail in Lahore. Jail officials said both men had taken their own lives sometime between 10 p.m. and 2 a.m. The provincial prisons official said the guard on duty had been asleep, and the jail superintendent, Mian Farooq, said the matter was under investigation and nothing had yet been established.

The bodies told a less certain story. Doctors at the city mortuary found injuries on both men that pointed to strangulation, and Iqbal's body bore many healed wounds from a blunt weapon. Police investigators doubted that the two men had taken their own lives at the same time, and said the evidence and the condition of the bodies contradicted the official account. In letters from prison, Iqbal had complained of torture by jail staff and wrote that he was being "encouraged" to commit suicide. No relatives claimed either body, and the two men were buried near the jail.

Iqbal had surrendered on December 30, 1999, at the office of an Urdu-language newspaper in Lahore, ending a huge manhunt, after confessing that he had killed 100 boys. Most of them, it was alleged, were beggars and street children between 6 and 16 whom he lured to his home in Lahore. On March 16, 2000, he was sentenced to death 100 times. The judge ordered that his execution mirror the way the children had died. Iqbal, who later denied his guilt, appealed to the Lahore High Court, which after months of delay sent the case to the Shariat Court, saying it did not have jurisdiction.

Jail officials said the two men took their own lives, while the doctors' first findings pointed to strangulation, and the deaths were officially ruled suicides.

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