The manila evidence folder lay open on the judge's bench, revealing photo after photo of young boys, most of them shirtless, their dark hair tumbling across smooth brows, their deep eyes peering quizzically at the unseen man behind the camera. A few smiled shyly. Some seemed apprehensive.

Did they know?

Did they imagine that this fatherly little white-haired man who now sat in the courtroom, this man who lured them one at a time from the spice-scented city streets of Lahore in the Punjab region of Pakistan , meant to harm them? Or had they been on their own on the streets so long that they had learned not to expect anything but abuse and exploitation? Was that what the judge was seeing in the eyes of the boys in the photos? Was it the unimaginable sadness of a child who knows with perfect certainty that nobody cares?

Javed Iqbal (left) in black being led
into court to hear the verdict
(Dawn)

The judge looked down from his perch at the defendant. A hundred deaths would not be enough to punish Javed Iqbal and his three young accomplices for what they had done. Perhaps no penalty on earth could atone for the crime Javed had committed; luring 100 young boys to his run-down flat during a brief five-month period, where he raped them, strangled them with an iron chain, and then dumped their bodies into a vat of acid.

As horrifying as the crime was, what is even more horrible to comprehend is the fact that no one had noticed that most of the children — foot soldiers in a vast army of urchins who prowl the streets of Pakistan's cities — were even missing until Javed himself confessed to his crime in a letter to authorities. Even after his confession, given first to a local newspaper, bungling police officials couldn't locate Javed until he walked under his own power into police headquarters to surrender.

Certainly, as commentators would later write, the judge recognized that he was a monster and most monstrously he had, it seemed, exposed a terrible secret about Pakistani society, that it was a place where a child's life is next to worthless, a place where 100 children could vanish, suffer terrible tortures and brutal deaths and no one would even notice

Javed, it seemed to the judge, had not become the worst pedophile and serial murderer in recent Pakistani history. He had accomplices: the uncaring Pakistani population and an incompetent police force.

Where in the law books would the judge find the penalty for that?

The answer wasn't in the books, the judge realized. It was in the deep and tragic eyes of the 100 boys whose photos spilled out of the manila folder onto his desk.

Speaking slowly in English, the official language of the Pakistani courts, the judge sentenced Javed to be strangled to death with the same chain he used to kill the children. The judge further ordered that his body "will then be cut into 100 pieces and put in acid," the same concoction of hydrochloric and sulfuric acids the killer used to dispose of their bodies of his young victims.