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When word got out that such a crime had been
perpetrated, the clamor in the press began immediately. And to a great
degree, much of the outrage was focused on the police. It didn’t help
matters that the man who had admitted to murdering 100 children –
while he was free on bail on a previous child molestation charge, had
apparently vanished into thin air.
In the detailed note he left for authorities and
for the press Javed claimed that he planned to commit suicide by
tossing himself into the River Ravi with a rock tied around his neck.
It would have been a tidy end to the case. But after dragging the
river with nets, authorities soon realized that Javed’s suicide note
was nothing more than a ruse.
They launched what to that point had been the
largest manhunt in Pakistani history. And they met with some modest
success. Javed’s accomplices were arrested in Sohawa when they tried
to cash a traveler’s check for 18,000 rupees. A few days later, one of
them, Billa, died in police custody. Authorities said he committed
suicide when he threw himself out of a third floor window, but the
suicide, coupled with the bad publicity over the entire affair,
triggered a massive shakeup in the Lahore police department. The
public outrage continued. As Husain wrote at the time, “even after the
case had been handed to the police on a platter, the best they could
do was carelessly lose an alleged accomplice of the killer. Apparently
he managed to commit suicide while being interrogated by jumping
through a…window. This is such a common occurrence that by now one
would imagine that by now the police would have thought of a better
cover-up for death in custody.”
In the meantime Javed himself remained at large.
Though there is no evidence that he left the area, police were simply
at a loss to find him and pressure was mounting. Every day, it seemed,
grieving parents, who had been silent when their children were
missing, wailed in the press – both at home and overseas – that they
were being denied justice.
“Nobody knows the pain I’m going through,”
Shamim Akhtar, whose 14-year-old son Kamran Shaukat was among the
victims, told Time Magazine.
“Because we are poor, nothing is being done.”
On December 30, 1999, however, the manhunt came
to a close, when Javed simply walked into the newspaper officers of
the Urdu language daily newspaper Jang, and surrendered.
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| Lahore,
Pakistan court building (AP) |
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