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A paternal looking man in his mid-40s with a
shock of white hair and glasses, Javed would often wander through the
markets. It was there, the twice-divorced father of two would later
claim, that he collected teenage boys whom he took to his three-room
flat on Ravi Road to work as his servants. Such arrangements are not
uncommon in the subcontinent. Although the Koran strictly forbids
homosexual relations and is even stricter when it comes to pedophilia,
many older men regularly take young boys to be their lovers and
servants. In fact, in places like the Northwest frontier provinces of
Pakistan, not far from Lahore, such relationships are “a matter of
pride,” or a “symbol of social status” for the older men, according to
a 1997 survey conducted by Pakistan’s National Coalition for Child
Rights. Poems have been written about the love between a man and his
servant. And while not usually discussed in polite company, the
practice is generally understood and even accepted in other parts of
both Pakistan and Afghanistan as well, the survey found.
Javed -- a man who identified himself variously
as a journalist and a social worker -- steadfastly maintained that he
was not cruising for sex on his regular forays to the market square,
but was instead a desperately lonely man, looking for lonely boys to
help him with his daily tasks. The teeming square, he would later say,
was full of likely candidates. They appeared, like so many of the
throwaway children who gather in swarms around Lahore, to be sweet and
vulnerable and desperate for someone to lend them a hand, he said. But
he complained that some of them were brutal opportunists who exploited
him.
In fact, he would later claim in his confession
to police, it was an attack by some of the boys he had taken into his
home that triggered his bloody killing spree.
According to Javed’s original statement – never
confirmed by the authorities and which he later tried to retract – he
was brutally beaten and left for dead by a pair of young street kids
he had taken into his home. In an account published in Dawn,
Pakistan’s most prominent English language newspaper, on January 14,
2000, Javed said he suffered such a severe head injury that his memory
was affected. He underwent several operations, he said, and during the
process lost both his house and his car. His mother, so broken-hearted
at the condition her son had sunk to, simply died, he told police. He
turned to police for help, he said, but they refused. Instead, he
argued, the police turned on him, accusing him – falsely, he insisted
– of sodomy.
With no one else to turn to he looked to four
young friends – identified only as Nadeem, Shabir, Sajid and Ishaq
Billa, to care for him, he told authorities. It was then, according to
the statement he gave authorities, that Javed decided to enlist them
in a gruesome plot to avenge his mother’s death.
The price for her suffering and his was the
deaths of 100 children. They could easily be found in the market
square that surrounds the minaret.
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