Mohammed Bijeh worked in a brickworks around Pakdasht, an impoverished district of migrant labourers and Afghan refugees some thirty kilometres south-east of Tehran. The Iranian press called him the vampire of the Tehran desert. Sources disagree about his age: reports at the time of his execution gave it variously as twenty-two, twenty-three and thirty.
Between March and September 2004 he and an accomplice, Ali Baghi, also named in the reporting as Ali Gholampour, lured boys out into the desert by telling them they were going to dig rabbits or foxes out of their burrows. The boys were aged between eight and fifteen. He stunned them with blows from a stone, raped them, and buried them in shallow graves in the desert. Iranian media reported that he burned bodies as well. Adults were killed too, two or three depending on the account. Iranian reporting called him the Hyena.
His stated motive was money. He said he had first intended to take the children of government officials and had turned instead to the children of poor families because he thought he was less likely to be caught.
The families had been reporting boys missing for months. The failure to act on those reports became a scandal in its own right: seven police officers were investigated for dereliction of duty, two of them for failing to identify the pair and for ignoring requests from local people to examine one of the murder scenes, and several were suspended.
The numbers in this case do not resolve. He confessed in court to the rape and murder of sixteen boys. The charge sheet read out at his execution put the killings at twenty-one, alongside kidnapping and corruption on earth. Branch 74 of the provincial court sentenced him to sixteen counts of qesas, to public execution, to a hundred lashes and to fifteen years. Relatives of the victims said the real figure was twenty-six. Four families accepted blood money rather than press for a death sentence.
Baghi was initially condemned to hang with him. In January 2005 the Supreme Court substituted fifteen years, and he was acquitted of the murders while convicted of taking part in some of the abductions, which he had admitted. He also received a hundred lashes. The crowd at the execution called for him to be hanged as well.
The execution took place at Pakdasht on March 16, 2005, in the district where the killings had happened, before a crowd of about five thousand including women and children, held back by barbed wire and riot police. Bijeh's shirt was removed and he was handcuffed to an iron post, and judicial officials took turns delivering the hundred lashes while the crowd threw stones and shouted at them to hit harder. He fell to his knees three times and did not cry out.
He was then stabbed in the back by the seventeen-year-old brother of one victim, Rahim Younessi. The mother of another, Milad Kahani, was invited to place the blue nylon rope around his neck. He was hoisted about ten metres into the air by a crane, which does not break the neck, and was several minutes dying while the crowd shouted at him.
Human rights organisations condemned the manner of it, and the case is cited both as the largest criminal case in modern Iranian history and as an example of what public execution looks like in practice.