Kordiyeh was born in 1969 and drove a taxi in Tehran. Between February and June 1997 he picked up women and girls, aged from ten to forty-seven, raped them, stabbed them, and set the bodies alight with petrol. Nine died. The Iranian press called him the Vampire, and the case caused a public panic in the city.
He was arrested in June 1997 and convicted quickly. On August 12, 1997 he was flogged with a hundred lashes and then hanged from a crane in public, in the Karaj road area of Tehran, before a crowd reported in the thousands. Relatives of the victims were present at the execution, which is standard practice in Iranian qisas cases. Iranian reporting called him the Tehran Vampire.
The accessible record consists of wire reports of the execution and of the panic that preceded it. There is no published judgment, no account of the evidence, and no independent verification of the count. As with the other Iranian entries in this archive, the figure and the confession both come to us through the state's account of its own proceedings.