Ali Asghar Borujerdi was born in 1893 in Borujerd, in Lorestan in western Iran, then under Qajar rule. He is generally described as the first serial murderer recorded in Iran in the twentieth century, and he is known in Persian as Asghar-e Qatel, Asghar the Murderer.
He came from a family of highway robbers. His father, Ali Mirza, attacked caravans on the roads around Borujerd, Malayer and Arak, and his grandfather had done the same before him, sometimes killing the owners of the caravans he robbed. Borujerdi left home as a boy and travelled into Ottoman Iraq, first to Karbala and then to Baghdad.
By his own account the killings began in Baghdad when he was about fourteen and continued there for more than two decades. He assaulted and raped adolescent boys and then killed them, by strangling or stabbing, and in many cases cut off their heads to make the bodies harder to identify. The figure he gave for Baghdad was twenty-five.
In 1933 a boy saw him kill and he left Iraq rather than wait to be reported. He did not go back to Borujerd. He went instead to Tehran and took a room in the poor southern districts of the city, in the Bagh-e Ferdous neighbourhood and at the Reza Khan caravanserai, working as a porter and a vegetable seller. He spent his time around athletics, which is how he met boys.
His victims in Tehran were adolescents who had come into the capital looking for work, most of them sleeping rough. Tehran in the interwar years was growing very fast, and a large migrant and destitute population gave him a degree of anonymity. He killed eight in a short period and left the bodies in the south of the city.
The bodies were found decapitated, in furnaces and in the aqueducts near the village of Minudasht, the first of them on December 31, 1933. Their discovery caused a panic in Tehran on a scale the city had not seen before.
He was arrested once during the investigation and released for want of evidence. In early March 1934 the police took him again, and this time the case held. Officers went to the caravanserai and questioned his neighbours, who said he had introduced the dead boys to them as his own brothers. Clothing recovered was matched to one victim, a boy named Ali who had been working with him and had tried to get away. Under questioning Borujerdi admitted the eight killings in Tehran and the twenty-five in Baghdad.
He was tried in June 1934 and convicted of the rape and murder of thirty-three boys. His appeal failed and he was hanged in public, in front of a very large crowd, at Sepah Square in the Toopkhaneh district of Tehran. Sources give the date of the execution as either June 26 or July 6, 1934, and this entry cannot resolve which is right.
The case matters in Iran beyond its own facts. It arrived at the moment the Pahlavi state was building a modern police force and a forensic apparatus, and the investigation, the medical and psychiatric reporting around it and the press coverage all became part of how that machinery established itself. It is the subject of a scholarly study by Cyrus Schayegh, published in Comparative Studies in Society and History in 2005, which treats the murders as a episode in the formation of the modern Iranian state rather than simply as a crime.
The figure of thirty-three is his own confession, accepted by the court that convicted him. Twenty-five of those killings were in another country and another jurisdiction, and were never separately investigated or tried.