KILLER OF 100 BOYS BY ACID IN PAKISTAN

Javed Iqbal Mughal

To set the scene, imagine yourself in Pakistan. A little more tense than Dubai, but a little less ghost-town than Afghanistan, with the urban sophisticated refinement of Greece. Call it the Missouri of Asia. Except with more grieving families and dead, disfigured children, thanks in the most part to Javed Mughal.

This man, whose name makes my spell check cringe, was on the high road as far as Pakistani class systems were concerned (born in business, live in business. Born in poverty, live in poverty). His dad was a businessman, and this thusly prompted Javed to start a business of his own.

22 years old and already a successful businessman, Javed was on top of the Pakistani world. While his friends suffered in poverty, he flourished in decadence. Yet somehow, a perfect plot for Pakistani Psycho laid out. In between business meetings and fancy dinners, Javed murdered 100 little boys.

Strangled, dismembered, raped, dipped in acid, and dumped in a river. That was his method. The dipped in acid part, that’s not made up. He used vats of hydrochloric acid obtained and used from god-knows-where, and he would lower the bodies inside the vats for several seconds before pulling them out, scarred and burned beyond recognition.

He did this one hundred times. Each and every victim was a little Pakistani boy. Each and every victim was dumped at the bottom of a lake in the middle of nowhere, after being raped, dismembered, and dipped in hydrochloric acid.

What to do after collecting one hundred victims? What else but confess? In December 1999, Javed Mughal delivered a letter to the local police of Lahore, Pakistan. The same letter was sent to the city’s newspaper.

In the letter, he confessed to the murders of the 100 boys. All were between the ages of six and sixteen. He detailed the brutal ways in which he tortured and killed the boys, and how he dumped the remains into a river running near Lahore.

Investigators searched his house, and found the walls stained with blood. On the floor was a chain. Mughal claimed that the chain was used to strangle every single one of his victims. Sickeningly, there were also photos found at the crime scene. These photos depicted quite a few of his victims’ bodies (dead and alive) in plastic bags. Two smaller vats of hydrochloric acid were found in one of the rooms in his house, riddled with remnants and partially dissolved human limbs and heads.

In the letters he wrote to the police and newspapers, Iqbal stated that he had planned to drown himself in the same river he capsized the bodies after his crimes were completed. Pakistani police searched the river and found no Iqbal. Pakistan’s largest manhunt commenced.

Four people who lived in Mughal’s house with him (teenage boys, what?) were apprehended and charged with accomplice to murder. They were arrested, and one of them committed suicide by jumping from his cell window before he could be questioned.

After a month of questioning of these four and constant searching on the part of the police and the general Pakistani public, Iqbal turned himself in to the Daily Jang newspaper office on the last day of 1999. He stated that he was scared that the police would kill him, and therefore surrendered. What a pansy.

Javed Iqbal Mughal was sentenced to death by hanging, with a judge stating that he wished for Iqbal to be killed in the same way that he murdered victims. However, this modern day Code of Hammurabi was null and void in the civilized section of Pakistan in which Iqbal was prosecuted and charged.

Two years later, close to the time of his hanging, while on rounds, a guard found Iqbal and one of his remaining three accomplices dead on the floor of their prison cell. The cause of death reported was suicide by hanging from bedsheets.

Open and shut horrific serial killer case, were it not for two burning questions and eerie discoveries.

1) Iqbal and his accomplice were found dead, yet there were signs that they had been beaten prior to their “suicides”
2) Twenty-six of Iqbal’s supposed “victims” have shown up alive in the years since his confession. Are the other 74 truly dead? Or was this a massive hoax?

Regardless, there is no doubt that Iqbal deserves a rotting eternity in an acid-washed hell. Discuss.

Will We See Javed Iqbal Mughal In Hell?