LAHORE, April 17: A division bench of the Federal Shariat Court on Tuesday acquitted two alleged accomplices of a self-proclaimed serial killer of 100 children, Javed Iqbal, who had been found dead in mysterious circumstances in a Lahore jail after his conviction.

The appellants, Mohammad Nadeem alias Deemi and Mohammad Sabir, had challenged their 200 years imprisonment. A sessions court had awarded them the sentence on March 16, 2000. They had been charged with aiding the main accused in the 100 killings.

The court had also awarded an unprecedented sentence to the main accused. It had ordered to hang him publicly and chop off his body into 100 pieces, which be corroded in the same way he had done to the bodies of his victims by dipping them in acid.

Comprising Chief Justice Haziqul Khairi and Justice Mohammad Zafar Yaseen, the bench, while accepting the appeals of the co-accused Nadeem (who at the time of occurrence was of 13 years) and Sabir (who at that time was of 14 years), observed that while dealing with these two appeals the court was unable to close its eyes to the unprecedented conviction awarded to the main accused.

The bench observed that it was one of the most gruesome and shocking murders committed by a single person in the history of crimes in which one by one children of different ages for a fairly long period were first subjected to sodomy by him and then killed in the most cold, barbaric and inhuman manner, and their bodies were thrown into acid to dissolve. It said the court was aware how painful it would have been for the trial court to conduct such a trial, but by awarding the sentence he (judge of the trial court) crossed the barrier of law in awarding sentence to Javed Iqbal.

The bench further observed that such sentence was against the teaching of Islam and in violation of Rule 362 of the Pakistan Prison Rules and of no legal effect.

However, the appeal of Javed Iqbal and co-accused Sajid before this court had become infructuous because during their pendency both of them committed suicide in jail, the bench held.

Human Rights Commission of Pakistan chairperson Asma Jahangir, appearing on behalf of the appellants, had argued that they had been convicted on March 16, 2000, a few months before the promulgation of the Juvenile Justice System Ordinance, 2000, which envisaged, under section 5, separate trial of a child (below 18 years) from the trial of an adult person and that a child could not inter alia be subjected to any labour or handcuffed.

The bench observed: “That may be so, but the Juvenile Justice System Ordinance, 2000, extends to current, pending and future cases against a child and has no relevance to the decided and closed cases which were earlier in time to commencing day of the ordinance.”

The counsel also criticised police for implicating the appellants in the offence because they were minor at the time of the alleged occurrence and their confessional statement, obtained under coercion, had no legal value. She also questioned the prosecution claim of dissolving the human bodies into acids.

The case was taken to the Federal Shariat Court after the Lahore High Court refused to hear it on the grounds that the matter involved points covered by Hudood laws.

The serial killing of 100 children was masterminded by Javed Iqbal from Aug 20, 1999, to Nov 13, 1999, who himself recorded it in a diary and made photographs of the victims.

The Ravi Road police had registered the case on Dec 2, 1999, when a police party while patrolling the area found a door of the house of the accused unlocked and on entering the house found body parts and cloths of the murdered children.

Later, the Punjab police launched a manhunt, which ended after Javed Iqbal surrendered before police in the office of an Urdu newspaper.