June 17, 2022
The mother of Babak Khorramdin, a filmmaker whose grisly murder stunned Iran last year, has been sentenced to three years and nine months in prison after admitting to helping her husband kill and dismember their son.
Iran Mousavi-Sani, 75, and her husband, Akbar Khorramdin, 81, admitted to killing their 47-year-old son in May of last year after parts of his body were found by a garbage man in a dumpster in Ekbatan, a suburb of Tehran.
The parents later claimed to have also killed a missing daughter, Arezoo, and son-in-law, Faramarz, in 1990 and 1997, and to have left their bodies scattered in different parts of Tehran, saying all three of their victims had been “morally corrupt.”
A judge sentenced Mousavi-Sani to 45 months in prison June 9 for assisting in premeditated murder. In the last session of her defense, Mousavi had said: “I had to cooperate with my husband because I was afraid.”
Akbar Khorramdin died of late-stage cancer before he could stand trial. Under police questioning, he had been unrepentant, saying his son had “brought home female students” and was refusing to move out of the family home. Babak, a documentary filmmaker and cinema teacher, had lived in England before moving back home to take up a position at Karaj University.
“We decided to kill him,” his father said. “My wife poured a lot of sleeping pills into Babak’s food, and when my son was half-unconscious, I stabbed him to death…. “I’m relieved. I no longer have any worries in my life.”
After Babak’s death, the couple cut up his body and stuffed the parts into several plastic trash bags, which they then took from their apartment, down the building’s elevator and carried out to the dumpster.
