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Pak man convicted of 100 murders commits suicide

Javed Iqbal, the man who was sentenced to death for killing and mutilating 100 children, on Tuesday committed suicide along with his accomplice Sajid in a Lahore prison.

An official of Lahore's Kot Lakhpat jail said both the men were found dead, hanging from the hook of the ceiling fan in their cell.

The duo's appeal against a death sentence was pending in the Lahore High Court. They had pleaded innocence to the charges.

Last year, a judge of Lahore's district court found Iqbal guilty and ordered that he be strangled 100 times at Minar-e-Pakistan - a national monument in Lahore - and his body be cut into 100 pieces and put in acid, as he did with his victims. A similar sentence was imposed on his accomplice.

For months Iqbal and his accomplice had preyed on boys at public places in and around Lahore, luring them to his home in a poor neighbourhood with promises of money and video movies.

Later, the boys were sodomised, murdered, chopped up and thrown into vats of acid.

After reaching the target he had perversely set for himself, he wrote to the police and a newspaper that he had killed 100 children.

In March last year, Iqbal reached the office of the Jung daily in Lahore and admitted in front of reporters that he had killed 100 children.

However, in a lower court, he pleaded innocence saying he gave the earlier statement under 'duress'.

Iqbal, 38, had kept an annotated list of his deeds, with his victims' names and ages and the dates of their deaths. He also kept piles of clothing and shoes taken from his victims.

When, by his count, he had killed 100, he stopped.

"I could have killed 500. This was not a problem. Money was not a problem," he had told reporters. "But the pledge I had taken was of 100 children and I never wanted to violate this."

The 'pledge', he had said, was an act of revenge against the police.

He repeated a story that he had written in an earlier confessional, of how two young police personnel had beaten him up badly last year, of how the police had ignored his complaints and instead accused him of sodomy, something he had been charged with before.

Iqbal decided that killing the children would be his retribution.

"In this way, I would take revenge on the world I hated," he said of his six-month homicidal binge. "My mother cried for me. I wanted 100 mothers to cry for their children."

In September, the Lahore High Court refused to hear appeals moved by Iqbal and his accomplice because the case fell within the exclusive jurisdiction of the federal shariat (Islamic) court.

The two-member bench observed that the charge against the appellants contained the offence of sodomy as defined under the Hudood ordinance.

Though the accused were acquitted of the sodomy charge and convicted of murder and other offences, it is the charge as originally framed that determines the forum.

Under the Pakistani constitution, the federal shariat court has appellate jurisdiction over Hudood cases to the exclusion of all other courts.

Indo-Asian News Service

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