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Confessed killer says could have killed 500 kids

ISLAMABAD: A confessed serial killer said in remarks published on Friday that he murdered 100 Pakistani children without remorse and dissolved their remains in cheap acid to avenge having been beaten by police.

"I have no regrets. I killed 100 children. I was denied justice," Javed Iqbal told The News newspaper in Lahore shortly before he was arrested on Thursday night.

"I could have killed 500; this was not a problem. Money was not a problem. But the pledge I had taken was of 100 children, and I never wanted to violate this," Iqbal said.

Iqbal told the newspaper that he was motivated by a desire for revenge against police, who he said beat him when they detained him for questioning into allegations of sodomising children in the 1990s. He was never charged.

"I was so badly beaten that my head was crushed, my backbone broken and I was left crippled," he said. "I hate this world."

Iqbal eluded police for nearly a month after they found the remains of two children in a barrel of acid and a note saying he had killed 100 children in total.

But on Thursday he visited The News in Lahore, where the two bodies were found this month, talked to reporters and was then taken for questioning by police.

The News said it talked to Iqbal for an hour. He "appeared to be a greatly stressed man who spoke softly but at great length about his crimes and his motives, his methodology," it said.

CHEAP ACID

Iqbal, who left behind a collection of children's shoes and belongings when he fled the Lahore suburb where the bodies were found, told The News that his mother had been shocked to see him getting hospital treatment for the alleged police beating.

"She was weeping bitterly to see me in this state, badly hurt with tubes and cylinders attached to my body."

"My mother cried for me. I wanted 100 mothers to cry for their children," the newspaper quoted him as saying.

It said: "Javed continuously stressed this incident as the motive leading him to conduct the massacre he then undertook."

"Becoming intensely emotional and wiping away tears, Javed said he had been rendered impotent by the beating. He again and again emphasised that this was a turning point in his life," the newspaper said.

Iqbal said he had been helped by "accomplices" and said he had not sodomised the children because he was impotent.

"I went for healthy, strong looking boys, not frail kids," he said.

He said he mixed hydrosulphuric and nitric acid to dissolve the body parts. "This forms a deadly substance in which even bones vanish," he said. The acid cost 120 rupees ($2.10).

He said that his victims were "put to sleep" using gas. "I myself wore a mask and after about five breaths, the sleeping victim would be dead," he recalled.

"Then my friends would place a body in the container (of acid) and later drain it away," he said.

Police said they arrested two alleged accomplices of Iqbal on Thursday at another Punjab town, Sohawa, where the group vainly tried to cash travellers' cheques belonging to Iqbal.

Iqbal hid near a bank when the other two men went inside with his cheques but fled when police arrived on a tip-off from the bank staff, a police official said.

Police have said parents and other relatives have identified clothes and other belongings of 74 of the missing children who Iqbal claimed to have killed. The Punjab province government had offered a reward of one million rupees ($19,600 dollars) for any information leading to Iqbal's arrest.-Reuters