Over the weekend of June 11 and 12, 2005, a man named Yaghoub Ali Mirshekari was hanged in public in southeastern Iran. He had been convicted of murdering ten truck drivers to take their vehicles, and the Iranian press called him the Yellow Scorpion. He was born in 1957.
Almost everything known about the case comes from a single Agence France-Presse dispatch of June 13, 2005, reporting the execution. Iranian courts do not publish judgments in cases of this kind. None of the drivers has been named, and no account of the investigation, the evidence or the trial has appeared in print. Nothing further about the case has been published in Persian or English.
Wire reports of public executions in Iran in those years were drawn from local news agency copy, which carried the state's account and nothing else. The figure of ten and the method were announced, not independently established.