LAHORE, Oct 10: Psychologists describe Javed Iqbal Mughal alias Kukri as a pampered child who developed bad habits in early age and later spent most of his life keeping a brigade of teenaged boys around him.

People having a first-hand experience of meeting Iqbal term him a “boy hunter” who would go to any extent to satiate his lust for sodomy.

Since his teens when he owned a 200 CC motorbike, Javed Iqbal had been using different ways to lure boys. His “most effective” method was to make pen-friends through magazines on children.

After getting photos of his pen-friends, he would short list ‘attractive’ boys to maintain friendship with them. He would spend thousands of rupees on sending them gifts like perfumes, tickets, coins etc.

Javed Iqbal was the sixth child (fourth son) of Mohammad Ali Mughal, a well-off trader. He did his matriculation from Islamia High School. He started his own business in 1978 when he was an intermediate student at the Islamia College, Railway Road. His father bought two villas in Shadbagh. Iqbal set up a steel recasting business in one of the houses and lived there for years along with boys.

Other family members learnt about his bad habits when they also moved to Shadbagh but he would not allow them interfere in his life or speak against the boys accompanying him.

In late 1990, a man filed a complaint against Javed Iqbal for sodomising his son. Shadbagh police detained his father and two brothers after their failure to arrest him. They remained in custody for seven days but Iqbal did not surrender.

On the eighth day, one of his boys was arrested from his house and was detained at the police station. Within a few hours Iqbal surfaced and hurled abuses at his family members for allowing the police to arrest the boy. Later, he himself surrendered to secure the release of the boy.

For several years Iqbal resisted the efforts of his family to arrange his marriage. One day he stunned everybody by declaring that he had selected a bride for himself. She was the elder sister of one of his boys. “The purpose was to stop the boy from deserting him.”

The marriage which took place in 1983 lasted for a couple of months.

In an identical move, Iqbal married his youngest sister to one of his boys, Muhammad Iqbal. People who knew Javed Iqbal termed him an ‘evil genius’. He was well aware of law and punishment. He had a habit of filing applications to various departments, complaining about one thing or the other.

He was once arrested and jailed for six months on charges of committing sodomy but it had no effect on his inclination towards boys.

Once he assaulted the son of a respectable person of the Shadbagh. The matter was taken up by the elders of the area. He confessed to his crime before a panchayat at Gol Bagh. He signed a stamp paper, giving an undertaking that he would not do it again. Later, photocopies of the stamp paper were distributed in the area. On the panchayat’s order, he visited 100 shops in the main market to tender apology.

Shortly afterwards, his father died and there was nobody to stop the residents of Shadbagh to take him to the task. The next time he was caught, he was thrashed and ejected from Shadbagh.

Apart from his family business, everything Javed Iqbal did was aimed at luring boys. He opened a video games shop — the first of its kind in Shadbagh — and would offer tokens to boys at reduced rates and in some cases free of cost. He would throw a 100 rupee note on the floor and watch the boy who would pick it up. Then he would announce that his money had been stolen and he had to search everybody. The ‘thief’ would be caught and taken to an adjacent room where he would be sodomised. At times the money would be given back to the boy as a “gesture of goodwill.”

When people stopped their children from visiting the shop, Iqbal set up a fish aquarium and later a gym, again to attract boys.

He also set up an air-conditioned school (Sunny Side School) but it failed as nobody was willing to send children. He also opened a fair-price shop where items of daily use were sold at a price lower than the market value. That too lasted for a few weeks.

Javed Iqbal also invested in a monthly magazine (Anti-corruption Crime) where he published the ‘heroics’ of police officers and established good contacts in the department. He interviewed at least two dozen police officers, including SSPs and DIGs.

Following the death of his father in 1993, Iqbal received a hefty share of Rs 3.5 million from the estate. He constructed a large house in Rana Town, Shahdara, in 1995 with a pond in the basement and a swimming pool in the backyard. He loved moving around in style and was often seen driving in a five-door Pajero along with half a dozen boys. “Once he owned four vehicles — a Pajero, a Lancer, a Toyota and a Suzuki FX,” said one of his old friends.

Javed Iqbal sold his Rana Town house and shifted to a new residence in Fatehgarh, Ghaziabad, and opened a video games shop there.

In September 1998, Iqbal and his employee, Arbab, were severely beaten up by another employee and a masseur, and deprived of Rs 8,000 in cash. Iqbal sustained serious head injuries and remained unconscious at the Lahore General Hospital for 22 days. Initially, the Ghaziabad police registered a robbery case but later, on the complaint of Arbab’s family, amended the FIR and charged Iqbal with sodomy. He was arrested on release from the hospital. He was later granted bail by a local court.

As no body in the family was willing to spend money on his treatment, his Ghaziabad house, car and shop were sold out and the money was used for his treatment.

On getting better, he was shocked to find that his assets had been sold.

On more than one occasions, he told his brothers that he had prepared a chemical which left a person reduced to a skeleton in minutes.

Iqbal started his killing spree in May 1999 and himself leaked it to the press. “I did it to avenge an attempt on my life by my boys, the death of my mother and injustice in society,” he later told police.