When Alam Khan was 12 years old, he watched his father get murdered before his eyes. His killer was Mohammad Rais, someone they had thought of as a family friend. Khan was devastated, but he was only a child. There was nothing he could do—for the time being.
For the next 12 years, Khan plotted before he took his revenge. Finally, when he was 24, he lured Mohammad Rais to his home, pretending he needed a repairman. Once inside, Khan fed liquor to his father’s killer until he was too drunk to move. Then he played some music, turned up as loud as it could go. He did not want anyone to hear Rais’s screams.
Khan stabbed Rais again and again until he stopped moving. Then he grabbed a hammer and a hacksaw and cut his body up. He chopped it up into twelve pieces—one for each year he had waited.
“I waited twelve years to realize my dreams,” Khan told the police when he confessed. He felt no remorse, he told them. He was just happy it was over.
8Azerbaijan Eye-For-An-Eye
One of the earliest concepts of justice calls for an eye-for-an-eye. It seems like a simple enough idea—if someone is convicted of murder, they should be killed. But what happens if someone is convicted of rape?
One man in Azerbaijan took this concept literally. His eight-year-old child had gone through unimaginable horrors. He was lured into a truck by a stranger who beat him and violently raped him.
A passerby saw what was happening and intervened, threatening to tell everyone what had happened. For a moment, the boy thought he was saved—but the second man did not have any interest in protecting him. He just wanted in. When the first man was done, the second man raped the boy as well.
When the boy’s father found out, he swore revenge. But he did it in a way nobody else would even think of doing. He did not call the police. Instead, he organized a gang, tracked down the man who had abused his child and took an eye-for-an-eye. He did to him exactly what he had done to his son—the father revenge-raped his son’s rapist, filmed it with his cell phone and shared the video across the country.