Eight men and one woman, a region that runs from the Black Sea mountains to the Moroccan coast, and a century of courts that disagreed with one another about almost everything except the verdict. The serial cases of the Middle East and North Africa do not form a school. A shepherd in northeastern Turkey who told a judge that the old were living in the place of the young; a brick-kiln worker whose crimes broke a poor town on the edge of Tehran; a mason in Mashhad whose arrest split the Iranian press into those who wanted him punished and those who wanted him thanked; a Moldovan immigrant in Haifa who tore up his own plea agreement in front of three judges; a gang leader in the Nile Delta who blamed a spirit. What they share is the paper trail. Each case ended in a courtroom, and the sentence says as much about the country that passed it as about the man who received it.
The record is uneven. Several of these trials were closed or barely described, and totals shift from one outlet to the next.
Adnan Çolak admitted killing eleven elderly people in Artvin province, in northeastern Turkey, between 1992 and 1995. The people he killed were between 68 and 95 years old, according to the national papers Milliyet and Posta, which returned to the case several times over the years. Their names were never published in the national reports. Habertürk, in 2010, described all eleven as women; Webtekno, in 2024, said six of them were. Elderly couples were among them, according to Gazete Vatan.
The Turkish reports give few details of his life before the arrest. In an October 2006 article in Gazete Vatan, the journalist Türkan Hiçyılmaz interviewed the researcher Sevinç Yavuz, who described him as an uneducated shepherd. His date of birth was not reported; Milliyet in 2009 and 2016 and Memurlar.net in 2013 say he was 25 when the killings began. The same Vatan article carries an account of his childhood that comes from Çolak himself, spoken in court: he was one of five children, the family slept in one room, and he had come to hate his parents there. The newspaper reported the statement without testing it.
The investigation, by Yavuz’s account, was slow. The gendarmerie and the police did not connect the deaths to one another. Local newspapers gave the unknown killer a name, Artvin Canavarı, and, Yavuz said, called him nothing else. Canavar is the Turkish word for a wild beast, and she argued that Turkish culture tends to describe a man who kills repeatedly as a beast rather than recognize him as a serial offender. She had asked the Turkish National Police for a list of the country’s serial killers and was given six names. Çolak was not among them. She counted him anyway. In the same interview she compared the Artvin cases with those of the American Richard Ramirez, whom she said had worked in a similar way in 1985, and added that she doubted Çolak had ever heard of him. The comparison is hers. No court or police finding links the two cases.
The series ended when one of the people he targeted survived. Posta’s 2018 gallery and a Demirören News Agency report printed by Gazete Vatan in August 2018 both say that this survivor helped lead the authorities to him; the 2006 Vatan article says only that he was caught after failing to kill the last person he had set out to kill. The date of the arrest was not reported.
Çolak confessed to eleven. Milliyet’s 2009 gallery and Haber7’s 2013 gallery both describe the eleven as his own admission, and both print the words he used to explain it. They are the words the Turkish press has quoted most often: if he killed old people, they had already filled out their time, and they were living extra years in the place of the rest of us. Memurlar.net adds the rest as the press reported it: he was satisfying himself, he said, and at the same time easing the burden on society. The 2018 agency report says he made that argument in his defense in court. Habertürk quotes a shorter version, that the old were eating the share of the living. No psychiatric examination has been reported.
He was tried far from Artvin, before the Zonguldak 1st Heavy Penal Court. Why the case was heard there has never been explained. Milliyet’s 2009 gallery says the trial lasted five years. The court sentenced him to death six times, and the reports disagree about what came with that. Milliyet in 2009, Memurlar.net in 2013 and Webtekno in 2024 give 112 years of heavy imprisonment; Posta’s 2010 summary gives 40 years; Milliyet in 2016, Posta in 2018 and the 2018 agency report mention only the 112 years. Which of the eleven deaths each sentence covered, why six death sentences and not eleven, whether there was an appeal and when the judgment became final: none of this has been reported.
Those death sentences were passed in a country that had stopped carrying them out. Human Rights Watch noted in August 2002 that Turkey had not carried out a judicial execution since 1984, although courts kept passing death sentences. On August 2, 2002, the Turkish parliament abolished the death penalty for offenses committed in peacetime and replaced it with life imprisonment. Human Rights Watch reported that eighty-three prisoners on death row were reprieved, among them Abdullah Öcalan, the leader of the PKK. How this affected his own sentences has not been reported.
On May 28, 2005, he walked out of prison. Posta’s 2018 gallery and the 2018 agency report say he was released under the conditional release provision known as the Rahşan affı, Law No. 4616 of December 21, 2000, and Webtekno repeated in June 2024 that he was freed in 2005 despite six death sentences and a 112-year term. The law took its popular name from Rahşan Ecevit, wife of Prime Minister Bülent Ecevit. According to a December 2025 report in Karar on its history, the proposal grew out of a news story she had read about a two-year-old girl who spent her days in a kindergarten and her nights in prison with her mother, who was serving a 27-year sentence. President Süleyman Demirel vetoed the first version, Karar wrote, and the bill went through on a second attempt after prison riots; prisons built for about 70,000 inmates were holding about 40,000 afterward, though the number rose by more than 20,000 within three years. In July 2001 the Constitutional Court ruled on challenges to the law, and its deputy president, Haşim Kılıç, announced that the court regarded it as a conditional release law rather than an amnesty, Bianet reported. Crimes committed by people freed under it shocked the public, Karar wrote, and Rahşan Ecevit herself later said that what she had in mind was an amnesty for the poor, not for killers.
On the morning of Sunday, January 5, 2014, Ali Kaya, then 35, left Gaziantep H-type prison in southeastern Turkey during an open visit at about 10:30. Guards realized he was gone only when they counted the inmates of his ward after visiting time. Turkish newspapers had for years called him "bebek yüzlü katil," the baby-faced killer, a name they said came from his youth and innocent face, and had put him on their lists of the country’s serial offenders.
By the time of the escape the press linked him to as many as ten deaths going back to 1997. Posta’s 2010 report spoke of eight between 1997 and 2004; Hürriyet, Timeturk and Hürriyet Daily News said ten in 2014. The record that can be traced is narrower. He was sentenced to five years for killing his uncle in Alanya in 1997. Milliyet reported that he was acquitted in a later set of cases in Alanya. For the other deaths attributed to him, the newspapers reported no verdicts. Those killings are attributed to him in the press, not proven against him in any reported judgment.
Ali Kaya was born in 1978, according to Posta, and came from Gaziantep. Milliyet reported in 2014 that he was involved in theft, assault and snatch theft as a boy and was jailed at 17; Posta, in 2023, said he was sent to a reform institution for juveniles. Both papers say he was 19 when he came out in 1997. The five-year term appears in Milliyet’s 2009 and 2014 galleries, and Posta wrote in 2023 that he served part of it. Milliyet reported that he was released from Silifke prison in 1999. It is the only sentence for a killing that has been reported in full.
After that release, according to Milliyet’s 2009 gallery, Posta’s 2018 gallery and Posta’s 2023 feature, Kaya killed a man named Zeynel Abidin Gümüş, whom he accused of having assaulted his mother while he was in prison. Milliyet’s 2009 gallery places the killing in Adana; its 2014 gallery places it in Alanya and adds that he left a note saying "Allah beni çağırıyor," God is calling me, and vowed to settle accounts with sinners and enemies. Nothing has been reported about Gümüş beyond his name and Kaya’s accusation, and no trial outcome is known.
Psychiatric findings shaped what followed. Milliyet reported in 2014 that Kaya was held at Elazığ closed prison, sent to a hospital, and released in 1999 after a report concluded that he could not be kept in an enclosed place ("kapalı yerde duramaz"). His last violent episode in Alanya, by the same account, involved two prison officers; whether they survived has not been reported, and no charge or verdict is known. After it he was diagnosed with a personality disorder and sent back to a psychiatric hospital.
Milliyet and Posta report that in 2000, at the psychiatric hospital in Manisa, a fellow patient, Ayhan Kartal, was killed, and both attribute the death to Kaya. No reported court decision covers it, and whether Kaya was ever tried for it has not been reported. After Manisa he was moved to the semi-open prison at Şanlıurfa and got away about a year later; Posta puts the transfer in 2003 and the escape in 2004. He was arrested in 2004 at Mahmutlar, in the Alanya district, carrying a false identity card in the name of Erdal Yılmaz, and with a long list of names that included well-known businessmen, Milliyet reported. Investigators treated it as a list of intended victims. In statements to investigators in 2004 and again in 2012, Milliyet wrote, he said he would "cleanse society of bad people." Psychiatrists quoted by Milliyet in 2014 said he had a tendency to go on killing until he was stopped.
The next period is the least clear in the reporting. Hürriyet Daily News wrote in January 2014 that he was briefly released in March 2012 after a report said he had a mental disorder, and that he then turned on people who had testified against him, killing three. It named neither them nor the trial. The killing reported in most detail from this period is that of Mehmet Poyraz in Gaziantep: Hürriyet, citing the Doğan News Agency, dated it to March 31, 2012, and Posta, in 2023, to April 6, 2012, while Milliyet’s 2014 gallery places it in 2004. By January 2014 Kaya was in Gaziantep H-type prison, where, according to Hürriyet, he was serving a sentence on a murder conviction. Which killing that conviction covered has not been reported.
The January escape was his second. Hürriyet Daily News described him as a very dangerous fugitive, and Hürriyet reported that inquiries were opened into officers who might have been negligent. He was recaptured in Gaziantep on March 3, 2014, and returned to the same prison. Posta reported in August 2023 that he was still in prison.
Mohammed Bijeh was a young laborer in the brick kilns of Pakdasht, a poor town southeast of Tehran. For more than a year, children from the area went missing. In September 2004 police arrested Bijeh and a fellow kiln worker, Ali Baghi. A Tehran court convicted Bijeh of the murder of children and adults, with kidnapping and other offenses, and AFP reported, citing the newspaper Kayhan, that it passed 16 death sentences. The charge sheet read out at his execution listed 21 killings, AFP reported, and relatives of the victims said the real number was 26, a figure never tested in court.
The case caused national outrage in Iran, and not only because of the killings. Families had been reporting their children missing for months, and the police and judicial officials who were supposed to look for them were later criticized for failing. In October 2004 Radio Farda reported that President Mohammad Khatami asked the interior minister to follow the case personally. A statement posted on the police website said 19 officers had been held responsible for negligence of duty during the period of the killings, and that the files of seven detained officers had been sent to the judiciary; it did not say what punishment they would face.
Little is known about Bijeh before his arrest. At his execution AFP gave his age as 22. A 2018 review of the case by Siavash Hooshyar for Ekhtebar, an Iranian legal news site, records his full surname as Basijeh, with Bijeh the name he was known by, and says he was born in the Iranian year 1361 in Torbat-e Heydarieh. He grew up in a large family, with six full and six half siblings. His mother died when he was small, Ekhtebar reports, and he described constant conflict with his father, who took him out of school. At about 11 he moved with his family to the Tehran area and went to work as an unskilled laborer in the kilns. In October 2004 Radio Farda reported that he had told the media that his mother had mistreated him as a child. Ekhtebar adds that a forensic examination recorded no chromosomal abnormality and measured a high IQ, and that a psychiatric evaluation described an antisocial personality marked by emotional coldness, a lack of empathy and impulsiveness.
The court’s own reckoning, as Ekhtebar reports it, put the killings over 19 months; AFP and Radio Farda both reported that the two men had been taking children for more than a year. Ahmad Azimi was nine. At the execution his father told AFP that Ali Baghi had confessed and should be executed as well.
Ekhtebar describes an investigation that went wrong for a year or more. Children had been reported missing about a year before the case broke, and police detained about 80 people over time and released them for lack of evidence. One of them, Ekhtebar says, was Bijeh himself, held for some weeks or months and then released. Commentators at the time suggested that some families were slow to report their children missing because they feared deportation, and relatives said the police did not seriously follow up the reports they did make.
The case broke in the first days of September 2004. Three schoolboys were reported missing on 10 Shahrivar 1383, Ekhtebar reports, and a child gave police information about three missing friends; Baghi was arrested first, and Bijeh on 15 Shahrivar. Ekhtebar says Bijeh confessed only after long questioning. A report prepared for the government by Ali-Asghar Ahmadi concluded that a proper investigation could have stopped the killings earlier, according to Ekhtebar, which adds that the judiciary held the Pakdasht prosecutor, his deputy and two investigating judges negligent, and that the head of the Pakdasht justice department resigned.
The two men were tried in Tehran by Branch 74 of the provincial criminal court. Ekhtebar names the presiding judge as Mansour Yavarzadeh, sitting with four advisory judges; Bijeh’s court-appointed lawyer was Dabir Daryabeigi. The trial was due to open behind closed doors, Radio Farda reported, and AFP reported that it lasted about two days. Relatives disrupted it, rushing toward the defendants after Bijeh described what he had done to one of the boys, and the court continued in private. A witness told AFP that Bijeh was completely calm and showed no remorse, and his own lawyer told the media the same, according to Radio Farda.
AFP reported on October 15, 2004, that the verdict had been delivered once the trial moved into private session. Ekhtebar, which gives the verdict date as 27 Aban 1383, sets out the judgment count by count. In its account the court acquitted Bijeh of theft and convicted him of the murder of 20 people, children, women and men; for 16 of those it passed sentences of retaliation (qesas), and for the other four it ordered blood money (diyeh). For kidnapping he received 15 years, and for seven counts of attempted murder, three years. He was also sentenced to 100 lashes. AFP reported that the courts ordered Bijeh to pay blood money to four of the families and asked the government to pay the rest; blood money for a male victim stood at 220 million rials, about $25,000, and half that for a female victim. The governor of Tehran province, Ali-Akbar Rahmani, had already said the state would pay, Radio Farda reported. The Supreme Court upheld the verdict. Bijeh was executed at Pakdasht on March 16, 2005. Ali Baghi, the second defendant, is given by Ekhtebar as 31 at the time of the trial; he too worked in the kilns.
Saeed Hanaei was a construction worker in Mashhad, the city in northeastern Iran that holds the shrine of Imam Reza and draws millions of pilgrims. Between 2000 and the summer of 2001, women of the city died one after another. The Iranian press called the deaths the spider killings, and the Mashhad newspaper Khorasan was the first to bring them to public notice, Radio Farda reported. On July 25, 2001, intelligence agents arrested Hanaei, then 39, a married father of three, in Mashhad. He confessed to killing 16 women, the Deseret News reported, and said he had done it for God and to protect his religion.
The women who died were between 25 and 50, RFE/RL reported, and their families had not claimed them; Radio Farda’s Persian service, reviewing the case in April 2002, wrote that the first death and at least eight more like it drew little public attention for exactly that reason. By the summer of 2001 rumor held that the deaths were the work of a group of religious extremists rather than one man. A member of parliament, Ali Zafarzadeh, told RFE/RL that those responsible were "definitely" part of an intricate network with access to court documents, and compared the case to the 1998 killings of four dissidents by agents of the Intelligence Ministry. Another deputy, Ali Tajerani, accused security officials of laxity. Radio Farda’s review said that public statements of concern by Fatemeh Khatami and Ali Tajernia, as that service spells the second name, pushed intelligence officers in Khorasan province to pursue the case on their own track. The search went on for more than four months after the eleventh death, and in that time two more women died. In April 2001 a 22-year-old laborer confessed to the killings and was released when his claim appeared to be a hoax, RFE/RL reported.
What led to Hanaei, Newsweek reported, was a woman who got away from him and eventually brought police to his door; Radio Farda’s review said the authorities disclosed only that his last intended victim identified him. The national police chief, Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf, said on state television that the suspect had been arrested in connection with 16 killings, and that arrests had been made in three other cases that police believed were the work of other men acting alone. Der Standard reported that three further deaths in Mashhad were attributed to copycats, and the Deseret News that two more bodies were reported after the arrest. Newsweek counted 21 victims over about a year; RFE/RL counted 19. Police did not attribute the later deaths to Hanaei. Radio Farda gave his own count of responsibility as 13.
On July 27, 2001, Hanaei gave a jailhouse confession to the local press, Newsweek reported. When he went with a judge to a site connected with the case, he told reporters he had acted "for the sake of God and for the protection of my religion," the Deseret News reported; Der Standard carried a similar statement. Radio Farda’s later account said that if he had not been caught he would have killed 150 women. He repeated the figure in a prison interview for the Iranian-Canadian journalist Maziar Bahari’s documentary, telling the filmmakers he was not repentant, IranWire reported. From his arrest he presented himself on camera as a religious devotee, saying he was cleansing Mashhad, and Radio Farda noted that he referred to his service in the Iran-Iraq war. Newsweek reported that he had a history of mental illness and a criminal record.
Within weeks the case was a national argument. Newsweek reported that many hardline supporters of the regime publicly praised the killings as a moral cleanup. The conservative newspaper Jomhuri Islami asked in print, "Who is to be judged?" Radio Farda wrote in 2002 that Jomhouri Eslami and Kayhan, both overseen by the office of the Supreme Leader, defended Hanaei on the ground that the victims' blood was forfeit and argued that condemning him had no legitimacy. A resident of Mashhad told the Deseret News that God might bless the killer. The head of the judiciary, Ayatollah Mahmoud Hashemi Shahroudi, said the killer would not have been provoked had the Islamic laws on public morality been enforced, RFE/RL reported. The sociologist Mohammad Badizadeh warned that the killings might give others a reason to commit similar murders. Qalibaf called the matter a bitter reality that would take national will to address, the Deseret News reported.
The politics were national. Mohammad Khatami, the reformist president, had won a second term in June 2001 and promised an end to lawless violence linked to parts of the state; in 1999 intelligence officials had been arrested and convicted over the killings of liberal writers and opposition activists. At his swearing-in in August 2001, Newsweek reported, Khatami warned that "the worst threat against Islam is violent actions in the name of religion."
Hanaei’s defense relied on a rule in Iran’s Islamic criminal code under which a person whose blood may be lawfully shed can be killed without the killer being punished as a murderer. The trial judge, Hojjatoleslam Gholamreza Mansouri, rejected it, Politics Today reported. Hanaei was tried behind closed doors and sentenced to death for 16 intentional murders, with four years in prison for theft and use of a false document, a Basij membership card. Radio Farda reported on April 16, 2002, that he was to be executed at dawn the next day, a Wednesday, in a closed ceremony. IranWire and Politics Today give April 2002; IranWire’s photo captions give 2003. The case later became the subject of a documentary, an Iranian feature film in 2020, and Ali Abbasi’s Holy Spider, which competed at Cannes in 2022.
Mahin Qadiri was a married woman with two daughters who lived in Qazvin, a city in northwestern Iran. In 2009 police there arrested her in connection with a series of killings of older women that had frightened the city for months. According to investigators, as the writer Mitzi Szereto sets out their account, she took the women’s gold jewelry. She was convicted of murder. The official news agency IRNA, as reported by Agence France-Presse, said she had killed five middle-aged women between February 2008 and May 2009. Szereto places the five killings between February and May 2009. Investigators' account of her confessions put the total at six, counting a relative by marriage.
The case was taken over by the Qazvin prosecutor, Mohammad Bagher Olfat, who assigned a team to it, according to Szereto, and special investigators came from Tehran. The stolen gold had to be sold somewhere, and a sale in Iran requires a purchase invoice, so police followed the jewelry through the gold market and through security camera footage. The publicity brought its own problems: the Qazvin police received several tips a day, some from people who falsely claimed to have survived, and each had to be checked.
A survivor went to the police and helped them build a composite image of the driver of a car. What led them to a name, Szereto writes, was luck. Traffic officers reviewing the tickets issued on a day that mattered to the inquiry noticed one light-colored Renault. Its driver turned out to be a woman who had been questioned years earlier about the death of a man in Qazvin in 2006, and nothing had come of it; no charge or conviction for his death was reported, and the AFP report of the IRNA announcement does not include him among the people she was convicted of killing. The killing of a woman related to her by marriage had also been the subject of inquiries. When police showed the survivor a photograph, she identified the driver. Qadiri was arrested in Qazvin and her husband was detained as well; he was not reported to have been charged.
Investigators wanted to know whether she was responsible for all the killings, whether other deaths could be tied to her, and whether she had acted alone. At first she denied everything and refused to speak for 48 hours. Then she began to talk. She first admitted five killings and denied the sixth, the death of a relative who was the sister of her mother-in-law. Investigators believed her reluctance had to do with her daughters. Her mother-in-law was described as the only member of the family who had tried to help her, and Qadiri confessed to the sixth once she had been assured that her mother-in-law would care for the girls. Investigators suspected her husband, or a criminal group, of taking part. Qadiri insisted she had worked alone, and reconstructions based on what she told them matched the evidence. Szereto quotes one line from her: "They had gold and my baby was sick." Where and when she said it is not recorded.
IRNA announced the execution on a Monday in 2010, and AFP, reporting the announcement, said that by its own count the execution brought the number in Iran that year to at least 151, against at least 270 in 2009. Iran Human Rights, in its annual report published on February 23, 2011, counted at least eight women executed in Iran in 2010 according to official sources, of whom three were identified by name; Mahin Ghadiri, as the group spells it, was one, listed as convicted of murder. The name of the court, the date of the verdict, the length of the trial and any Supreme Court review were not reported.
Szereto sets Qadiri against the other Iranian serial cases of the early twenty-first century: Saeed Hanaei in Mashhad, Mohammed Bijeh near Tehran, Farid Baghlani in Abadan and Khorramshahr, and Omid Barak around Karaj. All were men. When Iran International reported in September 2025 on Kolsoum Akbari, a woman sentenced to death in a case involving the deaths of her husbands, it described her as the second known female serial killer in Iran, after Qadiri, and gave a wrong account of Qadiri’s case, saying she had been executed in 2006, which matches none of the reporting from 2009 and 2010.
Between February and May 2005, four people who knew Nicola Boner died in Haifa, in northern Israel. One was a woman he knew; the other three were men he drank with. At first police did not see a connection. Ynet reported in July 2005 that police had not at first realized one person was responsible, and Ynet’s English edition reported at the time of the arrest that in some cases investigators had first ruled out foul play before examinations showed that the victims had been killed. An investigator told Ynet on the morning the case was made public that the four cases were linked by similar features: "We realized there was a regular pattern repeating itself," he said. In a 2016 review of Israel’s first serial cases Ynet wrote that police did not recognize the pattern until after the third death, and identified Boner only after the fourth.
Little has been reported about Boner’s early life. Ynet’s English edition, which printed his name as Nicola Boner, reported at his arrest that he lived in Haifa and had moved to Israel from Moldova five years earlier; he was 32. In its 2016 review Ynet wrote that after his wife died he became dependent on alcohol and spent his time among the city’s homeless people.
The indictment, as Ynet reported it in July 2005, named the four dead. Rita Walman (as Ynet’s English edition spelled her name) was 51, lived in Haifa and knew Boner. She died on February 9, 2005, the first of the four, and police at first took it for an accident. The indictment charged him with her murder. The second, a man of 36, had known Boner before March 11, 2005, when, according to the indictment, the two quarreled and he was killed. The other two were men of 42 and 39. NEWSru.co.il, a Russian-language Israeli news site, described three of the four as immigrants from the former Soviet Union and reported that Boner had been seen with the three men several times beforehand; its spellings and ages differ from the indictment as Ynet gave it. Investigators concluded that all four had been beaten, and Ynet said a common feature in three of the cases formed the basis of the arson charges.
The break came from a fifth man, an acquaintance of about two years. He survived, Ynet’s 2007 report said, and his account helped solve the crimes. Boner was detained at the end of May 2005, and on May 30 the Haifa Magistrate’s Court cleared the case for publication. A police representative, Meir Levi, told the court that Boner had confessed and had reenacted the killings for investigators. The judge extended his detention by 15 days and ordered a psychiatric evaluation, which his lawyer had requested to establish whether he was fit to stand trial. It lasted more than a month, Ynet reported, and afterward the Haifa District Attorney’s Office decided to bring charges.
At the remand hearing Boner told the court that the victims had not treated him well but that he regretted what had happened. About the woman he said he had only beaten her and had not known she would die. He said he had been drunk. NEWSru.co.il reported similar remarks from another early hearing: "I know I did something wrong," he said, according to that site. On July 7, 2005, the Haifa District Attorney’s Office filed an indictment at the Haifa District Court, written by the state prosecutor. It charged four murders, the assault of a fifth person, rape and arson, and listed more than 100 prosecution witnesses. The rape charge was made public only when the indictment was filed, Ynet reported. The July report said the four had died between February and April, while the indictment’s own account, as Ynet summarized it, placed the last death on May 1; NEWSru.co.il, a year later, gave the period as January to May 2005.
The case was heard before three judges of the Haifa District Court, led by its deputy president. Boner was represented by a defense lawyer. On June 12, 2006, a plea agreement came before the court. Under it Boner would admit the acts charged, and Ynet reported that it had been understood to mean two consecutive life sentences; the prosecutor asked for two more to run concurrently and for the judges to decide the sentences for the other offenses. Before the hearing Boner told reporters in the courtroom that he had killed no one and had confessed because he feared that the police and the victims' families would harm his daughter and his family. When a translator put the agreement into Russian for him, he told the judges that he would not admit the charges or sign anything, tore up the document and threw the pieces on the courtroom floor. "I didn’t kill anyone, I was drunk during the interrogation, and I’m not confessing to anything," he said, as NEWSru.co.il reported it. According to that report, he said the police had told him that if he signed, he would be allowed to go free. He also told the court he wanted a new lawyer. The judges ordered the trial to continue. His lawyer said Boner had originally agreed to the terms and blamed the prosecution for a last-minute change; the Justice Ministry answered that the document accurately reflected the understandings reached earlier, and that there were records to show it. His lawyer later argued that his weak Hebrew meant he had not understood the confession he first signed.
In November 2006 the Haifa District Court convicted Boner of four counts of murder, together with rape, wounding, arson, destroying evidence and obstruction of justice. On May 6, 2007, it sentenced him to four consecutive life terms, reported as 120 years, plus 17 years to run concurrently, a sentence Ynet described as the heaviest the court had imposed. His lawyer said he would appeal the convictions and the sentence to the Supreme Court. Ynet wrote in 2016 that Boner was the first person in Israel to be called a serial killer.
Junaid Nawaz Lal Nawaz, a Pakistani national, was sentenced to death by the Al Ain Court of First Instance in the United Arab Emirates on May 29, 2001, after the court convicted him of murder in the deaths of five taxi drivers. The drivers were killed and robbed during a two-week series in the summer of 2000, between June 21 and July 4, around Abu Dhabi and Al Ain. Three more drivers were targeted in the same series and survived. After his arrest he confessed to robbing all eight men, Gulf News reported, and told investigators that he had acted alone.
Gulf News named the five men who died as Mulazim Hussain Ghulam, Zarmulla Khan, Gul Shameer Khan, Aidaz Gul Khan and Khajir Khan Sawar Khan, and described all five as Pakistani. The first three came from Waziristan, which the paper placed in Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province. The other two held Pakistani passports but were originally Afghan citizens from Khost, in Paktia province. The men’s ages, their years in the Emirates and the families they left behind have not been reported. Many taxi drivers in Abu Dhabi and Al Ain refused to take passengers to remote areas while the series went on, and some would not carry anyone traveling alone, because they feared for their lives; some kept metal rods and clubs in their cars. The fear fed rumors of a gang of three men. After his arrest Nawaz said that he alone had committed the crimes.
The 2004 Gulf News report dates his arrest to July 2001, which does not fit its own timeline of a death sentence in May 2001, and the exact date was not otherwise reported. He admitted that he was jobless and had absconded from his employers; his age, his district in Pakistan and the date he came to the Emirates were not reported. According to a summary of the first-instance ruling, Nawaz testified at his first hearing that he had intended to kill the drivers and rob them. He also faced charges of adultery and of absconding from his employers. The adultery charge was never explained, and whether separate counts were brought over the three drivers who survived was not reported.
He appealed the death sentence in August 2001, and the story changed. Now he said he had not meant to kill anyone and had wanted only to make the drivers lose consciousness so that he could rob them. The Federal Public Prosecutor lodged a counter-appeal the same day and pressed for the sentence to stand. He also claimed to be mentally unfit to stand trial. The appeal court dismissed that claim and held that he had intended the killings. The Federal High Court rejected his appeal on a Saturday, Gulf News reported on March 1, 2004, and confirmed the sentence. The ruling stated that the nature of the crime did not allow him to escape the penalty by paying blood money to the victims' families. The court referred the sentence to the Presidential Court for approval, and the paper reported that he would be executed once that approval was given. As of March 2004 it was awaiting that approval; whether it was granted or the sentence carried out has not been reported.
In the spring of 1906 young women were going missing in Marrakesh, Morocco. The family of one traced her to the shop of Hadj Mohammed Mesfewi, an older man who mended shoes and also earned money as a public writer, setting down letters for people who could not write their own. An older woman said to have worked with him named him, and he was arrested and confessed. According to a cable sent from Tangier and printed in an American newspaper in June, he was convicted of the deaths of 36 young women and condemned to death. Foreign officials in Morocco objected to the form of the sentence, and it was changed. He was dead by June 13, 1906. The women’s names have not survived in the accounts.
The case matters for its court, not for its details. Morocco in 1906 was still an independent sultanate, ruled since 1894 by Sultan Moulay Abdelaziz, Yabiladi notes in its 2020 history of the case, and a country under heavy outside pressure. That year an international conference met at Algeciras, in Spain, to decide Morocco’s future; the novelist Saeida Rouass, who researched the case for years, described it to Yabiladi as the moment "when Europe decided what it wanted to do with Morocco." In 1912 Morocco became a French protectorate, according to the U.S. State Department’s Office of the Historian, which also records that the United States raised its consulate at Tangier to a legation in March 1905. Rouass told Yabiladi that Marrakesh in those years faced locusts in the fields, tribal revolts against the sultan and fear of famine, and a 2024 survey in the Arabic-language outlet Arabic Post says the city’s authorities were already stretched by a run of crimes, including attempted killings, when the case broke.
The older woman is named in the 1906 account as Annah. Both Yabiladi articles describe her as about 70 and as Mesfewi’s accomplice. One of the families seized her and treated her harshly until she talked, the reports say, and she did not survive it; Yabiladi’s French account cites Al Ayam, in 2014, for the statement that the family abducted her. Before she died she named Mesfewi. She was never tried, and whether the family faced any consequence is not recorded. Mesfewi, Yabiladi’s French account says, was also put under harsh pressure and confessed. Arabic Post says he confessed to acting with an accomplice and that his motive was robbery. The women’s money and belongings had been taken, and Yabiladi’s French edition says the investigation showed the motive was money. The span over which the killings took place is not recorded.
Within days of the case coming to light he was condemned. The cable, as Yabiladi relays it, said that by an old Moorish custom he had been sentenced to be crucified, and the final order carried the sultan’s own signature. Nothing is recorded of a trial: who heard the case, what evidence was put, whether he had any defense. The sentence was set for May 2, 1906, according to Yabiladi’s French account, and did not take place. Foreign officials resident in Morocco objected, calling it cruel and inhumane, and intervened with the sultan. The authorities then announced a different sentence, which also was not carried out; Mesfewi was held in the Marrakesh prison until outside attention had faded. From May 15, 1906, he was brought out for public punishment, which Yabiladi’s French account says was reduced because of his age. The final sentence was carried out on Monday, June 11, 1906, a market day, before a crowd that Yabiladi, relaying the cable, puts in the thousands. Yabiladi’s French account says such a punishment had not been carried out in Marrakesh for many years. He died about two days later; Arabic Post gives June 13, 1906, as his date of death, though it describes the form of the execution differently. The two accounts cannot both be right, and the 1906 cable, the closest source to the event, supports Yabiladi.
The story reached the world through that cable. Both Yabiladi articles identify their main source as The Times and Democrat, a South Carolina newspaper that printed the Tangier cablegram on June 28, 1906. Rouass first read of the case in an old newspaper while working for an environmental charity in Oman, she told Yabiladi, and at first doubted it; at the British Library she located many other papers reporting the case in 1906, and she spent six months in Marrakesh gathering records. Writing for the Crime Readers' Association, she said she had nothing about the women except the total. When she turned the case into a novel she made a point of writing them as people: "It was important to me they too were characters, and not just nameless victims or numbers."
Ramadan Abdel Rehim Mansour led a gang that preyed on street children in Egypt in the first years of the 2000s. He was known as al-Tourbini, the Egyptian word for an express train. On May 23, 2007, the criminal court in Tanta, about 90 kilometers north of Cairo, convicted him and his deputy, Farag Samir Mahmoud, known as Hanata, of murdering 20 street children, with other charges, and of illegal possession of weapons, and sentenced both to death. Mansour was 27 and Mahmoud 25. The Associated Press, in a dispatch by Nadia Abou El-Magd printed by IOL, reported that the case had shocked Egypt. Both men were executed on the morning of Thursday, December 16, 2010.
The figures never settled. The two men confessed to killing 20 children, but police had been able to establish the deaths of only eight by the time of the verdict. Early press reports spoke of 14 boys and then of 40 children. A 2024 retrospective in Egypt Telegraph gave at least 32 over seven years, with the victims' ages as 10 to 14.
Mansour was born in Tanta, the main city of Gharbia governorate in the Nile Delta, according to Egypt Telegraph. As a child he fell in with a street gang, the account says, and learned early to take revenge on anyone who threatened to report him to the police. Drawing on what he told investigators, it says he rode the trains between Tanta and Alexandria and felt safer in Alexandria because there were fewer police. The nickname, Egypt Telegraph reports, was given to him after two members of his gang were arrested in 2006.
The children were among the most exposed people in the country. There were no official figures for homeless and street children in Egypt, the Associated Press noted at the time of the verdict; estimates ran from 200,000 to one million, and about a quarter were believed to be under 12.
The case first surfaced in October 2006 in reports in an independent Egyptian daily, the Associated Press said. In November a murdered child was reported in Shubra al-Khaimah, on the edge of Cairo, and police quickly arrested seven suspects, Mansour and Mahmoud among them, Egypt Independent later reported. Daily News Egypt reported at the end of November that two men had been arrested in connection with the deaths of 14 boys. The case had puzzled the police until the two fell into a police trap. Investigators said the two belonged to a group of four, with the nicknames Buka, Bazaza and Turini, a rendering of the name under which Mansour became known. The two confessed together with their accomplices, the paper reported, and the victims, as reported then, came from Cairo and from the governorates of Qalyubia, Alexandria, Beheira, Beni Suef and Gharbia.
One of the dead children was named in the first reports. Daily News Egypt identified him as Mohamed Kamal, a boy from Tanta, who had testified as a witness in a court case against the man the paper called Turini. That man was jailed as a result, and after his release, according to the report, he ordered the boy killed. Egypt Telegraph tells a similar story of an earlier arrest in which a 12-year-old boy in the gang reported Mansour to the police, Mansour was released for lack of evidence, and he took revenge on the boy; its version gives the boy a different name.
By the end of December 2006, Daily News Egypt reported, Mansour had been arrested on charges involving the deaths of 40 street children. The investigation widened in an unexpected direction. Mansour told police that he had caused a train crash at Kafr al-Dawwar in 1998 in which 58 people were killed. Prosecutors took the claim seriously enough to review the technical and forensic evidence and consult experts, but a railway official told the paper that his account was not plausible and that more complex technical faults had caused the crash. Families of children who had been missing for a long time came to the prosecutor’s office with photographs of their sons. Shown the photograph of a boy from Damanhour who had been missing for three years, Mansour said he had never seen him; he told investigators he had committed so many crimes that he could not remember their number or where they had happened. During his interrogation, Egypt Telegraph reports, he blamed a female jinn which he said had possessed him and ordered him to commit the crimes. Mansour and Mahmoud both confessed, Egypt Independent reported, to crimes in six different cities.
Under Egyptian law the judge referred the death sentences to the Grand Mufti for his opinion, which is advisory but a required step before a death sentence becomes final. Court officials, speaking anonymously, said they expected it by June 20, 2007, the date to which the court adjourned the case of five other defendants. Those five were later sentenced to prison terms of between three and 40 years, Egypt Independent reported in 2010. That paper, reporting the executions on the day they happened in an article by Sami Abdel Radi translated from the Arabic edition, described the two men as convicted of crimes against eight children, a lower figure than the 20 reported at the verdict; Egypt Telegraph says they were executed at Borg El Arab prison. Mansour’s brother told Egypt Independent that their mother fainted when she was told the sentence had been carried out. The family had visited Mansour in prison the week before, he said; Mansour was calm and did not appear to know what was about to happen.
Set side by side, the cases show courts working with very different amounts of information. In Haifa a defendant tore up a plea agreement and the judges simply went on, producing a conviction, four consecutive life terms and an announced appeal. In Al Ain the appeal court rejected a mid-trial change of account and ruled that blood money could not replace the penalty. In Tehran a verdict was rendered in a private session and the state agreed to pay blood money to families, while the police and prosecutors who had let a year pass were the subject of their own findings. In Mashhad the court had to answer a defense built on the idea that the victims did not count, and it said no. In Tanta the number in the verdict was 20, the number of deaths police had established was eight, and a later newspaper report gave eight again. In Zonguldak six death sentences were passed in a country that had by then stopped carrying them out, and the man who received them was out of prison within a few years, under a law whose namesake said she had never meant it for him. In Marrakesh the account of the sentence, its objections and its revisions comes from a single cable.
Names are missing, dates conflict, and several outcomes, Kaya’s cases, the Zonguldak appeals, the Emirati approval, were never reported at all.
• 1906: Hadj Mohammed Mesfewi is arrested in Marrakesh; sentence set for May 2 does not take place; public punishment from May 15; sentence carried out June 11; dead by June 13.
• 1984: Turkey’s last judicial execution before abolition (Human Rights Watch, 2002).
• 1992 to 1995: Adnan Çolak’s eleven admitted killings in Artvin province.
• 1997: Ali Kaya sentenced to five years for killing his uncle in Alanya; released 1999.
• 2000 to July 2001: Women die in Mashhad.
• June 21 to July 4, 2000: Five taxi drivers killed around Abu Dhabi and Al Ain.
• December 21, 2000: Turkey’s parliament adopts Law No. 4616.
• May 29, 2001: Junaid Nawaz Lal Nawaz sentenced to death in Al Ain.
• July 25, 2001: Saeed Hanaei arrested in Mashhad.
• April 2002: Hanaei executed in Mashhad.
• August 2, 2002: Turkey abolishes the death penalty for peacetime offenses.
• March 1, 2004: Federal High Court confirms Nawaz’s sentence and refers it for presidential approval.
• September 2004: Mohammed Bijeh and Ali Baghi arrested at Pakdasht; October 2004, verdict reported.
• February 9 to May 1, 2005: Four deaths in Haifa.
• March 16, 2005: Bijeh executed.
• May 28, 2005: Çolak released under Law No. 4616.
• July 7, 2005: Nicola Boner indicted in Haifa.
• November 2006: Mansour and others arrested in Egypt.
• November 2006: Boner convicted.
• May 6, 2007: Boner sentenced to four consecutive life terms.
• May 23, 2007: Mansour and Farag Samir Mahmoud sentenced to death in Tanta.
• 2009: Mahin Qadiri arrested in Qazvin.
• 2010: Qadiri executed.
• December 16, 2010: Mansour and Mahmoud executed.
• January 5, 2014: Kaya leaves Gaziantep prison; recaptured March 3, 2014.