In 2001, an Iranian construction worker, Saeed Hanaei, was arrested for murdering 16 sex workers in the northeastern city of Mashhad. Luring them into his home, strangling them with a scarf and then dumping the bodies in roads or open sewers, the press dubbed him the “spider killer”. At his trial, before he was sentenced to be hanged, he claimed he was cleansing the city of moral corruption, even believing he had received divine approval. “I realised God looked favourably on me,” he stated. “That he had taken notice of my work.”
Rather than dismiss this as the ramblings of a psychopath, some religious hardliners celebrated his actions. “Who is to be judged?” wrote the conservative newspaper “Those who look to eradicate the sickness or those who stand at the root of the corruption?” Hanaei became something of a folk hero for extremists, and the subject of endless fascination. With the help of journalist Roya Karimi, Maziar Bahari’s 52-minute documentary ploughed through the case back in 2002.
