In Javed’s notebook and diary, in the macabre attention to detail as he turned his house into a museum of mass murder for the press and police he seemed almost to take pride in the horror he had wrought, authorities would later say. But when he finally appeared in court, faced with the very real possibility that he would be convicted and executed, Javed and his accomplices sang a very different tune.

It was almost surreal, observers would later say. His three accomplices, seemingly oblivious to the penalties that they faced, were seen giggling as they were led into the closed courtroom, ogling newspaper clippings about the case and admiring their own photographs, according to reports from the courtroom.

Javed Iqbal (AP)

For his part Javed insisted that he was an innocent man, a little mad, perhaps, and that he was the real victim in all of the horror.

“Whatever I wanted to say has been distorted,” he claimed. “I was considered an insane person but I beg that my view point must also be heard. I considered myself a culprit because I have been made a culprit by police.”

In a bizarre and rambling statement Javed said that the entire affair, the drums of acid, the photographs, the notebooks with personal details of each of the slain children, was an elaborate pantomime, an event he staged, he claimed, to highlight the dangers faced by “runaway children of poor families who become victims of evil people.”

He insisted the missing boys were alive, and challenged the police to find them, according to an account of his testimony in March 9, 2000 issue of Dawn. Some, he claimed, “were living with different people and were surely compulsive homosexuals,” while others had returned to their families, “but their parents are silent about it.”

Javed, who at first had provided such a detailed confession to the editors at Jang, to the police and later to a magistrate, insisted at trial, as he would a few weeks later during his appeal, that the confessions were made under duress, that he was afraid that he might suffer the same fate as Billa, and in a claim that particularly stung the families of the slain children whose bodies had never been recovered, he added that there were no eyewitnesses to his crimes. On at least two occasions, according to published reports at the time, family members were so overwhelmed by the proceedings and by their grief that they collapsed in the hallway outside the courtroom.

It was, by any measure, a grueling trial. In all, 102 witnesses – among them family members of the victims, including Riaz whose brother Ijad’s skeletal remains were found bobbing in the pool of acid – testified in the case, and Javed and his accomplices were convicted.

Two of the boys were given life sentences. But Sajid, who had just turned 20, and Javed, were sentenced to die in a way the judge felt best befitted the crime.

The judge ordered that the two be taken to the market square, where, in front of the families of their victims, they were to be strangled with the same chain used to kill Ijaz and the others. Their bodies would then be dismembered and the remains, dissolved in acid.