Killer of 100 children: Severe punishment was handed down to Javed Iqbal

ISLAMABAD: A judge in Lahore had convicted a man of murdering 100 children and sentenced him to be strangled with an iron chain 100 times, chopped into pieces and dissolved in acid in front of the parents of his victims. Javed Iqbal was sentenced to death on 100 counts on March 16, 2000.

Additional Sessions Judge Allah Bukhsh Ranjha in his verdict ruled that the convict Javed and his co-accused Sajid in the presence of the families of their victims be strangled with the same iron chain, which they used as a weapon of offence, their bodies be cut into 100 pieces and put into a drum containing acid as they did with those of the dead children. The judge had ordered that the death penalty should be carried out in a large public place. He ruled that the killer should be hanged near Minar-e-Pakistan.

The convict Javed Iqbal had filed an appeal before the Lahore High Court against his death sentence. However, after being pending for many months, the LHC referred the appeal to the Shariat Court, saying that it did not fall in its jurisdiction.

The horror of Iqbal's killings emerged in December 2000 when he wrote an anonymous letter to police claiming he had been killing runaway children and dissolving them in acid for months in his home in a slum near the Ravi Road in Lahore. "I have killed 100 beggar children and put their bodies in a container," he wrote. Police found vats of acid in his house, human bones from two bodies and piles of children's clothes.