Who is this Spider? One suspect recently confessed to 16 of the murders. But the mystery–and the horror–extend far beyond the individual killer or killers. Many hard-line supporters of the regime have publicly cheered the murder spree, which last month claimed two new victims in Tehran, as a moral cleanup campaign. “Who is to be judged?” demanded the conservative newspaper Jomhuri Islami. “Those who look to eradicate the sickness [like the killer] or those who stand at the root of the corruption [like his victims]?” Such comments, in turn, have fueled suspicions that the killer or killers are not acting alone. All the victims have arrest records–for prostitution and drug use, according to Iranian newspapers–leading some Iranians to wonder if the Spider had official help in identifying his targets. For the moderate majority of Iranians, that may be the most terrifying aspect of the crimes: they see themselves confronted not only by a serial killer but by a pervasive system of zealous cruelty and abuse.
Revolutionary Iran has a long record of vigilante attacks on students, intellectuals and politicians who embarrassed the regime. But the government of reformist President Mohammed Khatami, first elected in 1997, was supposed to end all that. Khatami promised more freedoms and an end to the regime’s own lawlessness. In 1999 some intelligence officials were arrested and convicted for their role in the serial killing of liberal writers and opposition activists. But Khatami, despite his landslide re-election in June, has looked ever weaker in battles with hard-liners. Just last week conservatives held up Khatami’s Inauguration until Parliament guaranteed them two open seats on the powerful Guardian Council. At his swearing-in Khatami warned, “The worst threat against Islam is violent actions in the name of religion.”
The main suspect in the Spider case is Saeed Hanaei, a 39-year-old construction worker with a background of mental illness and a criminal record. Police arrested him only last month–a few days after female members of Parliament demanded that Iran’s intelligence chief take action. Hanaei was angry, he declared in a jailhouse confession with the local press on July 27, because a cabdriver had mistaken his own wife for a prostitute. So he invited his prey, one by one, to his house in a working-class neighborhood while his wife and three children were away saying their prayers. But one woman “had long nails and scratched my hands,” he said. “She punched me in the stomach and got away.” Eventually she led police to his door.
Hanaei has no regrets. “Why should I feel remorse?” he says. “After killing them I removed all trace of them. They had no value to me.” (According to one reformist newspaper, he later admitted that he had had sex with them.) Hanaei also boasted that murdering the women was no harder than “breaking open a melon.”
In another country, such remarks might be dismissed as the musings of a psychopath. But there are justifications for such heedless killing in Iran’s Islamic criminal code, which declares some people unworthy of the blood that runs in their veins. Therefore their lives can be taken with impunity. “If the killer can prove that the victim was a ‘waste of blood’,” says one legal scholar who asked not to be named, “then there will be no charges against the killer.” Such laws, and such lawlessness, are the web that most Iranians long to escape.
