The first bodies were found in Tehran on December 31, 1933: adolescent boys, their heads cut off, left in the southern part of the city, in brick furnaces and in the aqueducts near the village of Minudasht. By most accounts there were eight. The victims were boys who had come into the capital from the provinces looking for work, most of them sleeping rough, in a city that was growing fast under the new Pahlavi state and had a large, shifting population of migrants and the destitute. The discoveries set off a panic of a kind Tehran had not known.
The police arrested a suspect, a porter and vegetable seller named Ali Asghar Borujerdi who lived in the poor southern districts, first in the Bagh-e Ferdous neighborhood and then at the Reza Khan caravanserai, and released him for lack of evidence. In early March 1934 they took him again. This time officers questioned his neighbors at the caravanserai, who said he had introduced the dead boys to them as his brothers, and clothing recovered was matched to one of the victims, a boy named Ali who had been working with him. Borujerdi confessed. He admitted the eight killings in Tehran and said that before that he had killed twenty-five boys in Baghdad.
He had been born in 1893 in Borujerd, in Lorestan in western Iran, into a family with a long history of crime; his grandfather, Zulfali, robbed caravans on the roads around Borujerd, Malayer and Arak and sometimes killed their owners, and his father, Ali Mirza, was known as a road thief too. When the boy was eight he left for Karbala, in Ottoman Iraq, with his mother and siblings, and six years later he moved on to Baghdad, where, by his own account, he began sexually abusing adolescent boys and eventually killing them, according to his first statements in order to throw off police who were watching him. The killings continued for more than two decades, and he often cut off his victims' heads to make them harder to identify. In 1933 a boy saw him kill, and he fled Iraq before he could be reported, not to Borujerd but to Tehran, where he spent his time around the athletic clubs, which is how he met boys.
He was tried in 1934 and convicted of the rape and murder of thirty-three boys, on the strength of his own confession; the twenty-five killings in Iraq were never separately investigated there. His appeal failed, and he was hanged in front of an immense crowd in Sepah Square, in the Toopkhaneh district of Tehran. The historian Cyrus Schayegh, whose study of the case appeared in Comparative Studies in Society and History in 2005, gives the date as June 26, 1934; other sources give July 6.
Schayegh's study treats the murders as a moment in the formation of the modern Iranian state. The investigation came as Reza Shah's government was building a modern police force and forensic services, and the case ran through the new mass press and the new medical and psychiatric writing of the day; that year the physician Muhammad-Ali Tutiya introduced his book Mental Diseases to a city that was talking of nothing but Asghar Qatel, Asghar the Murderer, the name by which Borujerdi is still known in Iran.