Saeed Hanaei was born in 1962, worked as a building labourer in Mashhad, and had served in the Iran-Iraq war. He was married with three children and lived in a modest house in the city.
Between July 2000 and July 2001 he picked up sixteen women who were working as prostitutes around the shrine of Imam Reza, took them to his home while his family was away, and strangled them with their own headscarves. He then dumped the bodies in the streets and in derelict ground around the city, in places where they would be found. Iranian reporting called him the Spider Killer.
He telephoned newspapers to complain that the police were not doing enough about vice in the holy city while he was doing it. Mashhad is Iran's most important pilgrimage centre, and the presence of destitute women, many of them addicted, around the shrine was a matter of public embarrassment. The press called the case the Spider Killings.
He was caught in July 2001 when a woman escaped from the house.
The reaction is what makes the case what it is. A significant body of opinion in Iran, including some clerical and press voices, argued that he had performed a public service, and his trial became a national argument about whether the killings were murder or the enforcement of religious duty. He was unrepentant throughout and expected to be spared. He was hanged at Mashhad prison on April 8, 2002. Ali Abbasi's 2022 film Holy Spider is about the case.