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 began to be found strangled in and around the city, most of them women with police records for prostitution or drug use. The Iranian press called the deaths the spider killings, because the killer seemed to draw his victims in the way a spider draws prey into its web. On July 25, 2001, police arrested Hanaei, then 39, a married father of three, and he confessed to killing 16 women. He said he had done it for God and to protect his religion.
What made the case known far beyond Iran was not only the killings but the response to them. Some hardline supporters of the Islamic Republic praised him. A conservative newspaper asked in print who ought to be judged, the man or the women. His 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 court rejected that argument. Hanaei was tried behind closed doors, sentenced to death and hanged in Mashhad in April 2002. The case was later the subject of a documentary made before his execution, an Iranian feature film in 2020, and Ali Abbasi's Holy Spider, which competed at Cannes in 2022.
Mashhad is Iran's holiest city, and the presence of prostitution there was a source of particular unease to many Muslims, the Deseret News reported from the city in August 2001. Officials acknowledged that prostitution was flourishing in Iran. The city had about 1.5 million people, and Mashhad's deputy governor for security, Hossein Zare-Sefat, said in July 2001 that 41 people had been killed there in the previous year.
The women who died in the series were described in the press as sex workers, drug users, widows, vagrants and women without homes, some of them cast out by their families. 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. RFE/RL reported in July 2001 that the families of the women had not claimed the bodies and that the victims' names had not been published.
Radio Farda dated the first body to 7 Mordad 1379 in the Iranian calendar. IranWire, writing in 2022, and the Turkish outlet Politics Today, writing in 2023, both give the span of the killings as July 2000 to August 2001.
Each of the women was strangled, and each was found in Mashhad. The Mashhad newspaper Khorasan was the first to bring the killings to public notice, Radio Farda reported, and the name spider killings soon followed.
RFE/RL reported that the women were between 25 and 50 years old and that all had criminal records for drug use and prostitution. Newsweek reported the same point about arrest records and noted that it fed a suspicion in Iran that the killer had official help in choosing his targets.
One of the women Hanaei admitted killing was Azam Abdoli, who was 45, the Deseret News reported in August 2001. Her husband, a street peddler, had died in an accident two years earlier, and she was the mother of a teenage daughter, who spoke to the paper about her. Her body was found on February 11, according to the same report.
The other women are known through the people they left. Maziar Bahari, the journalist and filmmaker who made a documentary about the case, told IranWire in 2022 that the two interviews that affected him most were with two girls, each the daughter of a murdered woman, each shown wondering how she would live without her mother. Bahari said he could not stay detached and arranged through a friend for a Mashhad charity to help the girls' family; the link was lost years later after that friend died, and he said he still wished to help them. The film also included a victim's father and a woman who had been married at 10 and later forced into prostitution by her husband, who described the conditions women like the victims faced.
As the deaths continued, women in Mashhad who had nothing to do with the street trade also became afraid. A young woman told Radio Farda that women in the city seldom went out alone. Another woman, walking in a Mashhad park in August 2001, told the Deseret News she could no longer trust any man she did not know.
Rumors spread that the killings were the work of a group of religious extremists rather than one man. RFE/RL reported that a member of parliament, Ali Zafarzadeh, said the killers 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 and called for some to be dismissed. The reformist deputy Fatemeh Khatami said members had written to the ministries asking for answers.
Radio Farda's 2002 review said that public statements of concern by Fatemeh Khatami and Ali Tajernia (the spelling Radio Farda uses for the second deputy) 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 body was found, and in that time two more women were killed, according to the same report.
In April 2001 a 22-year-old laborer confessed to the killings, saying he wanted to clean society of corrupt women. RFE/RL reported that he was released after his claim appeared to be a hoax.
RFE/RL reported on July 26, 2001, that police had announced an arrest in the series the previous day. The Deseret News reported that Saeed Hanaei, a 39-year-old construction worker who lived in a poor Mashhad neighborhood, was arrested on July 25 and confessed to killing 16 women. Newsweek reported that he was arrested a few days after women members of parliament had urged Iran's intelligence chief to act. Radio Farda wrote that intelligence agents made the arrest.
What led to him was a woman who got away. Newsweek reported that one woman fought him off, escaped and eventually led police to his door. Radio Farda's review said the authorities disclosed only that his last intended victim, who had escaped from him, identified him.
The national police chief, Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf, said on state television that the suspect had been arrested in connection with 16 killings, RFE/RL reported on July 26. Arrests had also been made in three other cases, which police believed were the work of other killers acting on their own. The Austrian newspaper Der Standard reported in the same period that three further deaths in Mashhad were attributed to copycats, and that two more women had died since his arrest the previous week. The Deseret News reported that two more strangled bodies were found after his arrest and that police said copycats were involved. Newsweek counted 21 victims over about a year and reported that two new victims had been found in Tehran in July 2001. Police did not attribute those later deaths to Hanaei.
On July 27, 2001, Hanaei gave a jailhouse confession to the local press, Newsweek reported. He said he had been angered when a cab driver mistook his wife for a prostitute. He said he had no regrets and asked why he should feel any remorse.
When he went with a judge to a site where one of the bodies had been recovered, 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 in German, quoting him as saying he had killed the women for God and to protect his religion, claiming they were prostitutes who corrupted others.
Radio Farda's later account of the confession added that he said he always went back afterward to the places where the women were found. He said that if he had not been caught he would have killed 150 women. Hanaei repeated that figure in his prison interview for Bahari's documentary, telling the filmmakers he was not repentant and would have wanted to kill 150 people had he not been arrested, IranWire reported.
Newsweek and Radio Farda both reported that he took the women to his home when his family was away.
Hanaei's explanation always went back to an incident involving his wife, but the versions differ. Newsweek reported in 2001 that he said a cab driver had mistaken her for a prostitute; the Deseret News reported that she was mistaken for one and propositioned. Radio Farda's 2002 account said the man was a truck driver who harassed her near a corner where sex workers stood. Politics Today, citing his wife's own statements, wrote that a taxi driver tried to force himself on her because he took her for a sex worker, and that her husband first set out to punish drivers, getting into fights with men, before turning on the women instead. Psychologists quoted by Radio Farda found the motive odd, since his anger should logically have fallen on the driver.
He described himself as a man of faith. From the time of his arrest, IranWire wrote, he presented himself on camera as a religious devotee and spoke of the women as corrupt, saying he was cleansing Mashhad. Radio Farda's 2022 review of Holy Spider 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.
Very little about Hanaei's early years has been reliably reported. Roya Karimi Majd, a Radio Farda journalist who researched Bahari's documentary and interviewed Hanaei, told IranWire that he spoke openly about violent abuse he had suffered as a child. That material was cut from the final film. Karimi Majd described him as a very simple and honest person but not very intelligent, and said she did not sense that he was hiding anything or performing to influence his verdict.
Within weeks of the arrest the case had become 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 argued that the women stood at the root of the corruption and asked: "Who is to be judged?" Radio Farda wrote in 2002 that Jomhouri Eslami and Kayhan, both papers 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.
Ordinary people in Mashhad were divided too. A resident quoted by the Deseret News said that God might bless the killer for killing corrupt women. The head of the judiciary, Ayatollah Mahmoud Hashemi Shahroudi, said the killer would not have been provoked had the Islamic laws against prostitution been enforced. The sociologist Mohammad Badizadeh warned that the killings might give others like Hanaei a reason to commit similar murders. The deputy governor Zare-Sefat said he did not condone murder but that society could not accept extramarital relations, RFE/RL reported.
Qalibaf, the police chief, called prostitution a bitter reality in Iran that would take national will to address. He said on state television that the police could round up the city's prostitutes within 72 hours but had nowhere to take them, because Iran had no organization to rehabilitate them, the Deseret News reported.
The case also landed in national politics. Mohammad Khatami, the reformist president first elected in 1997, had won a landslide second term in June 2001 and had 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, Khatami warned that "the worst threat against Islam is violent actions in the name of religion," Newsweek reported.
According to Radio Farda's 2002 account, the defense of Hanaei in the conservative press became so widespread that Ayatollah Ali Khamenei stated explicitly that no one in Iran could commit any crime, and in particular murder, on his own authority.
At the center of the argument was a principle of Iran's Islamic criminal code. Newsweek explained in 2001 that the code treats some people as having blood that may be shed, and quoted an unnamed legal scholar as saying that if a killer can prove his victim was such a person, no charges will be filed. Bahari told IranWire that the Islamic Penal Code then in force provided that killing a person whose blood may lawfully be shed counts as involuntary manslaughter rather than murder, and that Hanaei relied on that argument to justify what he had done. The code was amended in 2013, and the same basic rule was kept, in a different form, in Article 303, IranWire reported.
Hanaei's own claim was that the women were corrupt and that he had acted out of religious duty, Radio Farda reported. The trial judge rejected the religious justification.
The trial was held in Mashhad and was closed to the public, which is why the press published little about it, Radio Farda reported in April 2002. Bahari told IranWire that a friend of his had filmed the trial. The presiding judge was Hojjatoleslam Gholamreza Mansouri, according to both Radio Farda and IranWire.
After Khamenei's statement, Radio Farda reported, Mansouri announced that religious motives had played no part in the killings, and said that Hanaei had also sexually assaulted his victims. Prosecutors made the same allegation, the Radio Farda report said. Politics Today, citing the trial proceedings, reported that the judge asked Hanaei why he had sex with the women if his motives were religious, and that the prosecutor denied any religious motive and said Hanaei had sex with 13 of the victims before killing them. In 2001, Newsweek had reported that a reformist newspaper said Hanaei later admitted having sex with the victims.
Hanaei did not deny the killings. NPR reported that he admitted the murders at trial and drew sympathy from some ultraconservative Iranians who saw him as a hero, and that the trial caused a frenzy in the national and international press.
The court sentenced him to death. Politics Today reported in 2023 that the death sentence was imposed for 16 intentional murders, and that the court also sentenced him to 173 lashes for 13 counts of illicit sexual relations and to four years in prison for theft and for using a false document, a membership card of the Basij militia. Radio Farda's Persian report of April 2002, by contrast, says he took responsibility for 13 killings.
Reason's Kurt Loder wrote that Hanaei expected to escape punishment.
On April 16, 2002, Radio Farda reported that Saeed Hanaei, then 40, would be hanged at dawn the next day, a Wednesday, at a closed ceremony in Mashhad. Its English summary said he would be hanged in a prison in Mashhad. Loder, in Reason, wrote that he was hanged in 2002 in a large, gymnasium-like room in Mashhad's prison. Politics Today gives the execution as April 2002, and IranWire's 2022 article says he was hanged the April after the killings ended, while that article's photo captions put the execution in 2003.
The journalist and filmmaker Maziar Bahari came across the case by chance. He told IranWire that after the September 11 attacks he was in Mashhad and Herat on assignment for Newsweek, interviewing Afghan refugees, when a friend told him he had filmed Hanaei's trial and that the journalist Roya Karimi Majd was investigating the case. Karimi Majd agreed to work on a film, and every interview apart from Hanaei's own, including those with former colleagues of his, was done within two days.
Officials refused repeated requests to interview Hanaei himself. In the end the trial judge, Mansouri, gave permission, and Bahari met him inside the prison. Bahari and Karimi Majd then interviewed the victims' families, Hanaei's family and Hanaei. The finished documentary, And Along Came a Spider, dealt with forced marriage, the lives of sex workers, Islamism, misogyny and the shaping of children's beliefs; it included an interview with Hanaei's young son, who was proud of his father. Radio Farda's 2022 review of Holy Spider recalled that the son had approved of his father's actions on camera.
The film was praised and criticized. Some people praised Hanaei as a martyr, IranWire reported. Bahari said the film opened a 20-year-old wound, and that until then the Iranian media had said nothing about sex workers. After it was shown he was summoned to the National Security Committee of parliament, then under a reformist majority, where members asked mainly who had given him permission to film, and why he had made the film at all. Karimi Majd told IranWire that few if any documentaries about Iran's serial killers had been made inside the country since, and that Bahari's work had kept the case alive. The cartoonist Mana Neyestani later published a book about the case.
The case has since been made into two feature films. Ebrahim Irajzad's Killer Spider was released in Iran in 2020, IranWire reported. Ali Abbasi, the Iranian-Danish writer and director, told TheWrap that a feature about the case had come out in Iran a few years before his own.
Abbasi's Holy Spider premiered in competition at the Cannes Film Festival in May 2022 and received a seven-minute standing ovation, IranWire reported. Zar Amir Ebrahimi, who plays a journalist investigating the killings, won the festival's best actress award, and Mehdi Bajestani plays the killer, NPR reported. The Hollywood Reporter wrote that the film was shot in Amman, Jordan, standing in for Mashhad, from a script by Abbasi and Afshin Kamran Bahrami. Abbasi told TheWrap he had tried to shoot in Mashhad and had met Iran's Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance, but that it did not work out. The film uses a changed surname for its killer, Radio Farda noted, and its journalist and some key scenes are invented, as Loder pointed out in Reason.
Iran's Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance publicly attacked the film and threatened reprisals against the people who made it, NPR reported. Abbasi said Iran had compared the filmmakers to Salman Rushdie and that Ebrahimi received death threats daily on social media. The Academy placed it on its shortlist for the 2023 award for best international feature film, and it was not released in Iran. Released in theaters abroad in the fall of 2022, during a wave of protests in Iran, it drew a strong response from many Iranians, some of whom compared the film killer's violence to that of the Basij militia. "This is the real face of the Islamic Republic," Abbasi told NPR.
Bahari told IranWire that Abbasi had sent him the script, and that he thought the film was likely better than any that could be made inside Iran.
How many women he killed. In July 2001 the police chief tied the arrest to 16 killings, and Hanaei was widely reported to have confessed to 16. Radio Farda's Persian report of April 2002 says he took responsibility for 13; its English summary of the same report gives 16. Politics Today reports a death sentence for 16 intentional murders. The wider series was put at 19 deaths by RFE/RL in July 2001, with a judge quoted in a newspaper giving 17, and at 21 by Newsweek and the Deseret News in August 2001. Police said the remaining deaths were the work of other killers; none of them was attributed to Hanaei.
When the killings took place. Sources agree on a span of about a year ending with his arrest in late July 2001. IranWire and Politics Today give the end of the series as August 2001, after the July 25 arrest date reported by the Deseret News. A 2022 Radio Farda film review placed the killings in the late 1990s, which does not match the reporting of 2001 and 2002.
Sexual assault. RFE/RL reported in July 2001 that the victims showed no signs of sexual abuse. After the arrest, a reformist newspaper reported that he admitted sex with the victims (Newsweek), and at trial the judge and prosecutors said he had sexually assaulted them (Radio Farda; Politics Today).
Official help. Because every victim had an arrest record, some Iranians suspected that the killer had help from inside the system in finding them (Newsweek), and a member of parliament spoke of a network with access to court documents (RFE/RL).
His motive. The story of the insult to his wife comes in several versions: a cab driver, a truck driver or a taxi driver, mistaking her for a sex worker, propositioning her, harassing her or trying to force himself on her. All rest on his or his wife's own account.
His mental state. Newsweek reported a history of mental illness, without giving a diagnosis.
The execution date. Radio Farda reported on April 16, 2002, that he was to be hanged the next morning. Politics Today and the body of IranWire's 2022 article give April 2002; IranWire's captions give 2003.
2000: The first body in the series is found in Mashhad, on 7 Mordad 1379 in the Iranian calendar (Radio Farda); IranWire and Politics Today date the start of the killings to July 2000.
2000 to 2001: Women are found strangled in Mashhad; the Khorasan newspaper brings the deaths to public notice and the press names them the spider killings.
April 2001: A 22-year-old laborer confesses to the killings and is released when his claim appears to be a hoax (RFE/RL).
June 2001: Mohammad Khatami is re-elected president.
July 22, 2001: The latest victim before the arrest is found in Mashhad (RFE/RL).
July 25, 2001: Saeed Hanaei, 39, is arrested and confesses to killing 16 women (Deseret News).
July 26, 2001: RFE/RL reports that the police chief, Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf, has linked the suspect to 16 of 19 killings.
July 27, 2001: Hanaei gives a jailhouse confession to the local press (Newsweek).
August 2001: Hardline papers defend him; Khatami warns at his swearing-in against violence in the name of religion.
Before April 2002: Closed trial in Mashhad before Judge Gholamreza Mansouri; Hanaei is sentenced to death.
April 16, 2002: Radio Farda reports he will be hanged at dawn the next day in Mashhad.
April 2002: Hanaei is hanged in Mashhad.
Before April 2002: Maziar Bahari and Roya Karimi Majd film And Along Came a Spider, including a prison interview with Hanaei (IranWire).
2013: Iran's Islamic Penal Code is amended; the rule on killing a person whose blood may be shed is kept in Article 303 (IranWire).
2020: Ebrahim Irajzad's feature film Killer Spider is released.
May 2022: Ali Abbasi's Holy Spider premieres in competition at Cannes; Zar Amir Ebrahimi wins best actress.
Autumn 2022: Holy Spider is released internationally; Iran's Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance condemns it.