said. “If we are going to catch this delinquent, we will have to do it with their help.”
It was only after this serial killer got away that murder statistics were compiled by sex and the number of women being killed became apparent. Human-rights workers, who are regularly subjected to death threats and intimidation, say blaming the murder of women on gang violence is a deliberate oversimplification of the problem. Women are not only being “killed like flies” because they are considered of no worth, they say, but also they are being used as pawns in power struggles between competing organized crime networks.
This problem, it seems, has been going on for millennia. In the rainforests to the north of modern-day Guatemala City, in the country’s northern rainforest, archaeologists recently entering a long-sealed Mayan crypt found the remains of two women. One was pregnant. They were arranged in a ritual fashion, making it clear that they had been sacrificed as part of a power struggle between rival Mayan cities.
An attempt by the UN to set up a commission with powers to investigate and prosecute the country’s “hidden powers”, which they hope would serve as a model for other countries recovering from civil was, was dismissed by the Guatemalan authorities as “unconstitutional”. A debate began about how the terms of the commission can be amended to make it acceptable. But as the talking continues, so does the killing.
On just one day in June 2006, 12-year-old Hilda Macario was eviscerated with a machete while resisting rape—Hilda survived, but was shunned by her community because of the stigma attached to sexual violence—and 21-year-old Priscilla de Villatoro was stabbed to death by her boyfriend for refusing to have an abortion.
“Women here are dying worse than animals,” says Andrea Barrios of the Centre for Legal Action on Human Rights. “When the municipality announced this summer that it was launching a campaign to exterminate stray dogs, the public took to the streets in protest and it was stopped. But there is a great deal of indifference towards the murder of women, because a picture has been painted that those who die somehow deserve what they get.”
Hilda Morales, the lawyer heading a network of women’s groups formed as the problem has escalated: “Neither the police nor the government are taking this seriously. Yet what we are observing is pure hatred against women in the way they are killed, raped, tortured and mutilated.”
The situation is unlikely to change, she says, unless international pressure is brought to bear. Meanwhile the murder figures, not just of women, but also of political dissidents, male and female, continue to soar.
“Despite these cruel figures,” says Guatemala’s President Oscar Berger, “I am optimistic. We have reformed the police and we have more radio patrols.”
No one is holding their breath.
Iran’s Spider Killings
A new gang of serial killers are at large in Mashhad, one of Iran’s holiest cities. They have been strangling the local prostitutes and drug users and dumping them into local streets and canals. Newspapers have dubbed these slayings “the spider killings” because of the way the women were found wrapped in their black chadors.
The first body was found on a roadside in July 2000. The dead woman was 30-year-old Afsaneh, a convicted drug user and suspected “truck woman”—a prostitute who services truck drivers and delivery men. The following week, two more prostitutes were found strangled with their own headscarves. In both their scarves were tied with two knots on the right side of the neck.
Five months later, three more women were killed. The police then formally acknowledged a link between the killings and set up a special task force. It was thought the killings could be the work of religious vigilantes; the reform-minded parliament in Tehran ordered an inquiry. The authorities were especially sensitive about the killings because they occurred in Mashhad—the name literally means Place of Martyrdom. Iran’s second biggest city, it is one of the most sacred sites for Iran’s Shiite Muslims, drawing more than 100,000 pilgrims a year to the burial and shrine of the caliph Harun ar-Rashid and Ali ar-Rida, the eighth Shiite imam. But right next to the shrine there is an area inhabited by prostitutes and drug addicts. The drugs come from Afghanistan which is just a two-hour drive away and the general poverty of the city is fuelled by the 200,000 refugees who fled there from Afghanistan.
On 1 April 2001, following the parliamentary inquiry, the local investigative team was replaced with a special squad from Tehran. Within two weeks, three more prostitutes were dead, suggesting that the killings had a political motive.
On 27 July 2001, 39-year-old Saeed Hanei, a married man and father of three, was arrested. He confessed to the murder of 16 of 19 dead prostitutes in Mashhad over the past 12 months. He claimed to have been doing God’s work. After he had despatched 12 women, the drought that had been gripping the region lifted. The rains, he said, were a sign that God approved of what he was doing, so he killed four more.
A volunteer in the Iran–Iraq war during the 1980s, Hanei declared that he was not a murderer, but rather that the deaths were a “continuation of the war effort”. He was an “anti-streetwoman activist” who was only doing God’s will by ridding Iran of moral corruption. He believed the spider killings were acts of piety, saying that when the drought ended: “I realized God looked favourably upon me, that He had taken notice of my work.”
He said he wanted to “clean his neighbourhood”, adding: “I would have killed 150 if I hadn’t been arrested.”
Hanei would lure prostitutes to his apartment in late afternoon while his wife was out of the house, posing as a customer and often strangling them with their own scarves.
“Fourteen of 16 victims were junkies,” Hanei claimed, “and two or three of them had drugs on them.”
Indeed, all but one had convictions for drug offences or prostitution. All forms of prostitution have been banned in Iran since the 1979 Islamic revolution, but it has become more common in recent years. Hanei said that he began his murderous campaign after his wife was mistaken for a prostitute by a taxi driver. At first he went out looking for men who were soliciting prostitutes, but got beaten up, so he turned to killing the prostitutes instead.
Hanei’s slaughter of street drew support from religious extremists and the conservative press.
“Who is to be judged?” wrote the newspaper
Friends at the Mashhad bazaar said: “He did the right thing. He should have continued.”
And the hard-line paramilitary group Ansar-e Hizbollah warned that declining morality among women could lead to more such killings.
“It is likely that what happened in Mashhad and Kerman could be repeated in Tehran,” it said in its weekly publication.
However, within a few weeks of his arrest Hanei was charged with having “improper relationships” with his victims before strangling them, though Hanaei claimed that intelligence officers subjected him to psychological torture to force him to confess to adultery. As a result Hanei was charged with 13 counts of having sexual relations with married women as well as the 16 murders.
At his trial, Hanei insisted that the women he murdered were a “waste of blood”—a concept in Iran’s Islamic code that meant the victims deserved to die. As families of the victims looked on, Hanei said it was his religious duty to cleanse society of corrupt elements.
This was of little comfort to ten-year-old Sahar and eight-year-old Sara, the children of Hanei’s 14th victim. They recalled how their mother Firoozeh left home at about 5.30 p.m. one day to buy opium.
“We were all waiting for her but she never came home,” said Sahar.
Hanei was sentenced to death, but he was shocked and angry when the moment came for his hanging in April 2003. Unlike at his highly publicized trial, there were no cameras at his public hanging to record how he screamed in protest, baffled that his ideological allies never came to his rescue.
“Even until the last second before his execution, Hanei thought someone in the government would come to save him,” said young Iranian film-maker Maziar Bahari, who made the documentary
Hanei’s most vehement defender is his own 14-year-old son, Ali, who said his father was “a great man” who was cleansing the Islamic republic of the “corrupt of the Earth”.
“If they kill him tomorrow, dozens will replace him,” Ali said before the execution. “Since his arrest, 10 or 20 people have asked me to continue what my Dad was doing. I say, ‘Let’s wait and see.’”
He was right. Police now fear that a gang of “spider killers” is now at work.
