They Were the Nice, Older Couple Next Door. Then the First Body Turned Up. [View all]

[Demovictory9]

They Were the Nice, Older Couple Next Door. Then the First Body Turned Up.


Babak, left, with his parents Akbar Khorramdin and Iran Mousavi, on stage after the screening of his film. Credit...Yasaman Zohoortalab

An Iranian couple has confessed to murdering and dismembering their son, years after killing a daughter and her husband. They are not sorry.

The older couple first came to the public eye on a winter night in Tehran, when their film director son invited them to the stage after a screening. They were frail, and seemingly shy, and the younger man helped his mother up the stairs, then draped his arm around his father’s shoulder.

That was five years ago.

Now their son is dead, and Akbar Khorramdin, 81, and his wife, Iran Mousavi, 74, are back on the public stage, accused of his murder and, in a twist that has shocked and riveted Iranians, the killings of a daughter and a son-in-law over the course of a decade. The victims were drugged, suffocated, stabbed and then dismembered, the authorities say.

The couple has confessed to the crimes, but if Mr. Khorramdin, a retired army colonel, and Ms. Mousavi, a homemaker, are remorseful, they have done a good job hiding it.

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For Iranians, home is synonymous with sanctuary, and elderly parents, especially mothers, are revered as saint-like figures. And so they have reacted with bafflement and then outrage to every twist and turn of the case, and to the parents’ behavior after their arrests.

Photographs in Iranian media have shown Mr. Khorramdin clad in prison pajamas flashing a victory sign. He told the authorities that he would do it all over again — and might even kill his other two adult children, too, if he were released, according to news reports.


https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/05/world/middleeast/iran-parents-murders.html?action=click&algo=bandit-all-surfaces-engagement-time-weight&block=trending_recirc&fellback=false&imp_id=254700261&impression_id=6630c730-de1e-11eb-8e5a-8ffb1b5e62ef&index=0&pgtype=Article&pool=pool%2F91fcf81c-4fb0-49ff-bd57-a24647c85ea1®ion=footer&req_id=505707342&surface=eos-most-popular-story&variant=4_bandit-all-surfaces-engagement-time-weight