Javed Iqbal

Javed Iqbal Umayr (1956 – 8 October 2001), was a Pakistani serial killer who confessed to the sexual abuse and murder of 100 boys, ranging in age from 6 to 16. Iqbal strangled the victims, dismembered the corpses and dissolved them in acid as a way to conceal the evidence. He was found guilty and sentenced to death in the same manner that he killed the boys, being strangled first, then cut into a hundred pieces infront of the parents of the victims, and then be dissolved into acid, but he committed suicide before the sentence could be carried out.

In December 1999, Iqbal sent a letter to police and a Lahore newspaper chief news editor Khawar Naeem Hashmi confessing to the murders of 100 boys, all aged between 6 and 16. In the letter, he claimed to have strangled and dismembered the victims mostly runaways and orphans living on the streets of Lahore and disposed of their bodies using vats of hydrochloric acid. He then dumped the remains in a local river. In his house, police and reporters found bloodstains on the walls and floor, along with the chain with which Iqbal claimed to have strangled his victims and photographs of many of his victims in plastic bags. These items were neatly labelled with handwritten pamphlets. Two vats of acid with partially dissolved human remains were also left in the open for police to find, with a note claiming the bodies in the house have deliberately not been disposed of so that authorities will find them.

It was a month before Iqbal turned himself in at the offices of the Urdu-language newspaper Daily Jang on 30 December 1999. He was subsequently arrested. He stated that he had surrendered to the newspaper because he feared for his life and was concerned that the police would kill him.

Iqbal was the sixth of eight children of his businessman father. He attended Government Islamia College, Railway Road Lahore as an intermediate student. In 1978, while still a student, he started a steel recasting business. Iqbal lived, along with boys, in a villa in Shadbagh which his father had purchased for him.