Ramadan Abdel Rehim Mansour was born around 1980 in Tanta, in the Gharbia governorate of the Nile delta. From the age of twelve he worked in a cafeteria at the local railway station and handed his earnings to his parents.
The name he is known by was not originally his. A thug at the station called al-Tourbini, the express train, beat him and took his money, and by Mansour's account raped him and threw him from a moving train. The fall left him badly injured, with permanent damage to one eye, and hospitalized for a month. He later took the man's name for himself, and throwing children from moving trains became his own method.
Between 2004 and 2006 he led a gang that preyed on street children, of whom Egypt then had somewhere between two hundred thousand and a million. The victims were boys and girls aged ten to fourteen, most of them boys. They were lured onto the roofs of railway carriages, raped and tortured there, and thrown down at the trackside dead or barely alive. Some were put into the Nile. At least one was buried alive. The offenses ran across Gharbia, Alexandria, Beheira, Qalyubia, Cairo and Beni Suef.
He told prosecutors that he had been possessed by a female jinn who commanded him to do it. The Egyptian press repeated the occult material at length. He and his deputy had confessed to the killings, and those confessions were the core of the case against them.
The case surfaced in October 2006, first in reports by an independent daily newspaper, when bodies of children were found by the railway tracks and, in November, in a tunnel at Shubra El-Kheima. Two of his gang were arrested, confessed, and named him as their leader. His neighbors had thought him quiet and considered him slow; his brother was astonished.
On May 23, 2007, the criminal court at Tanta, ninety kilometers north of Cairo, convicted Mansour and his deputy Farag Samir Mahmoud, known as Hanata, twenty-five, while Mansour was twenty-seven, of the rape and murder of at least twenty street children, together with illegal possession of weapons, and sentenced both to death. Five other gang members received terms of between three and forty years. Egyptian procedure required the death sentence to be referred to the Grand Mufti, whose opinion is advisory, before it was final, and it was afterwards upheld by the Court of Cassation.
Mansour and Hanata were hanged at Burj Al-Arab prison on December 16, 2010. He was thirty.
Authorities linked him to at least thirty-two killings. The remains of eight victims had been recovered by the time of the 2007 trial, and twenty murders were what the court convicted him of. Some accounts carry the higher figure as the number of murders and spread the killing over seven years rather than two. The gap between the counts comes from the victims themselves, children with no papers and nobody to report them missing.
After his arrest, businesses in Tanta began trading on his nickname. Restaurants sold an al-Tourbini sandwich. Sheep merchants used the name for their largest lambs. Tuk-tuk drivers painted it on their vehicles. Shops and phone centers renamed themselves al-Tourbini: the Butcher of Gharbia. The journalist John R. Bradley, writing about it in Inside Egypt, said the reaction bordered on the incomprehensible and indicated that something had gone badly wrong in Egyptian society.