In the end, the Sha’aria never got a chance to issue its final ruling. On the morning of October 8, 2001, four days before the court was to issue its findings, authorities at the Kot Lakhpat Jail announced that Javed and his young accomplice, Sajid, had been found dead in separate but adjacent cells.

They had apparently been strangled with their bed sheets. Authorities claimed that the pair had committed suicide. But police investigators and some observers insisted that that the evidence seemed to contradict that theory. 

“It is probably a sign of the times,” Dawn editorialists wrote after Javed’s death, “that the story was not only disbelieved …Had the two wished a death by hanging, they needed only to withdraw their appeals.”

Doctors who performed the autopsies found that the pair had been bleeding from the nose and mouth when they died. There was evidence that Sajid had been beaten and that on Javed’s body, doctors found several partially healed wounds which had apparently been inflicted with some sort of blunt object.

Even more telling, authorities said, was a statement given by the guard on duty at the time of the alleged suicides. According to published reports, the guard, Iftikar Husain, told his supervisors, “I was asleep when the incident took place.”

Rather than immediately report the incident to his bosses, however, the guard reportedly “untied the knots of the bed sheets, laid the bodies on the floor to create the impression that they were asleep,” prison official Abdussattar Ajiz told the press. “He did so to save his own skin.”

Husain’s relief, Liaquat Ali, never bothered to check on the two prisoners, and it wasn’t until the next morning that the deaths were discovered.

The case remains under investigation.