◆ READER DISCRETION ADVISED ◆ This article contains accounts of premeditated serial murder involving the poisoning of multiple individuals over two decades. It is written with full respect for the victims and their families and sourced entirely from court records, official Iranian judicial documentation, and verified international journalism. Reader discretion is advised.
She presented herself as a gift to struggling families — warm, reliable, willing to care for elderly fathers that their children no longer had the time or means to look after. She married those men. She monitored their health with the patience and precision of someone who understood exactly what she was doing. She waited for the correct moment. Then she administered the combination she had refined across two decades of practice. Old men die. Nobody asks too many questions. She collected what they left behind and found the next one. She did this, by the court's conservative count, eleven times. She herself could not say how many more.
THE WARMTH THAT FAMILIES TRUSTED
In the cities and towns of Iran's northern Mazandaran province — Sari, Neka, Mahmoudabad, Babol, Qaemshahr — there exists, as in every society, a quiet crisis of elderly loneliness. Men who have outlived their wives, or whose children have moved to cities, or who have simply arrived at the stage of life where the days are long and the company is sparse. Families who love their fathers but cannot be present every day. The gap between what elderly people need and what their families can provide is real, persistent, and difficult.
Kulthum Akbari understood this gap with the precision of someone who had spent years studying it.
She was born in 1967, in the village of Malekabad-e Bala in Iran. Her first marriage, by her own account and those of relatives, was at eighteen — to a man who, family members said, suffered from mental illness. Her second marriage placed her in a household with a much older man and, by her account, years of physical abuse from both her husband and his sons. When he died, she was left with a daughter, limited resources, and an understanding of elderly men and the families around them that she would spend the next two decades converting into a criminal enterprise of extraordinary duration and reach.
She began attending women's social gatherings — the informal community networks that form the connective tissue of life in Iranian towns and cities. She spoke openly, participants would later tell investigators, about her desire to marry again. Specifically, she said she wanted to marry an elderly man who lived alone. She spoke about it the way people speak about a genuine preference, a considered life choice, something she had thought about and arrived at honestly. She was warm. She was communicative. She was the kind of person who made herself easy to trust.
Families who heard about her through these networks — families with fathers or grandfathers who were aging and lonely and needed someone — found her reassuring in exactly the ways they needed to be reassured. She was attentive. She was patient. She was willing to take on a role that the family could not fill. When arrangements were discussed, she was amenable. When dowries were negotiated — sometimes substantial ones — she accepted them with the dignity of a woman who understood her own worth. She married the man. She moved in. She began the process.
THE METHOD
The combination Kulthum Akbari used was not improvised. It was refined across years of application into something that prosecutors would later describe to the court as a carefully constructed pharmacological regime calibrated to produce death at a pace indistinguishable from natural decline.
Sedatives administered in small doses over time produce in elderly patients a progressive weakness, cognitive confusion, and physical deterioration that, in a man already in his seventies or eighties with existing health conditions, presents to a doctor as the ordinary trajectory of ageing. Blood pressure medications, given at incorrect dosages or in combination with other substances, can produce cardiac events. Diabetic drugs administered to a non-diabetic man drive blood sugar to dangerous lows. Industrial alcohol, introduced into food or drink, causes organ damage that accumulates invisibly over weeks.
None of these substances, individually administered to an elderly man with chronic illness, raises the kind of alarm that triggers an investigation. They produce symptoms that elderly men produce. They produce outcomes — heart failure, organ shutdown, the quiet cessation of a body that has been working hard for eight decades — that families grieve and doctors sign off on and the world moves past. Kulthum understood this. She had observed it carefully, across multiple marriages, and she had learned what worked and what did not work and what pace allowed her to remain invisible.
She monitored her victims' health with the attention of a practitioner. Court documents note that she tracked the progress of each man's deterioration with a precision that prosecutors described as meticulous — waiting for the moment when his condition was sufficiently advanced that a final deterioration would be accepted without question. She was not impatient. She was, by every account from the court proceedings, someone who understood that patience was the instrument that made her system sustainable.
She transferred the inherited property and the dowries into her daughter's name. She moved to the next city. She found the next family with the lonely father. She attended the next gathering and spoke openly about wanting to marry an elderly man who lived alone.
She did this for twenty-two years.
"The defendant was skilled at covering her tracks. Most of the victims appeared to have died of natural causes due to their age and chronic illnesses, allowing her to continue for decades without raising suspicion." — Prosecutors, Mazandaran Revolutionary Court, 2025
THE MAN WHO SURVIVED
Gholamreza Babaei was eighty-two years old when Kulthum Akbari entered his life in 2023. He was her final husband. He was also, in a development that she had not encountered in the preceding two decades of marriages, suspicious.
He noticed things. The timing of what she gave him. The way he felt afterward. The progression of his own body in ways that did not correspond to how he had felt before she arrived. He was eighty-two years old and he had lived a long life and he understood, in the way that people who have paid attention to their own bodies across decades of living understand, that something was wrong in a way that was not simply ageing.
He told his son.
His son might have dismissed it — an elderly man's anxiety, a suspicion born of confusion, the kind of thing that families reassure themselves away from when the alternative is too disturbing to accept. But his son had received information from a different direction that he could not dismiss. A family friend had mentioned, in passing, that his own father had been previously married to a woman named Kulthum who had attempted to poison him. The friend's father had survived by expelling her from the home. He had not gone to the police.
When Babaei's son recognised the connection — the woman his father had described, the woman the friend had named — he went to the police immediately.
Kulthum Akbari was arrested in September 2023. When she was brought before the camera at the time of her arrest, she introduced herself. She was calm. She was composed. She had the manner of a woman who had spent a very long time being trusted and had not yet fully recalibrated to the reality of what was happening.
THE CONFESSION AND THE NUMBER
Under interrogation, Kulthum Akbari confessed. She confirmed that she had been poisoning elderly husbands across a period of more than two decades. She confirmed the substances she had used. She confirmed the method of patient, gradual administration designed to produce deaths that would not trigger investigation.
When investigators asked her how many she had killed, she gave an answer that has stayed in every account of this case since it was first reported.
She said she could not remember precisely.
This was not amnesia in any clinical sense. It was the statement of a woman for whom the individual deaths had ceased, at some point in the long middle years of her campaign, to be discrete events. They had become a process. A rhythm. The cycle of identification, marriage, administration, and collection had repeated often enough that the specific instances had blurred into the general practice. She could not remember precisely how many because there had been enough of them that precision was no longer something she had tracked.
Investigators found, in examining her history, that she had contracted eighteen non-official temporary marriages and nineteen official marriages during the period in question. All of the husbands had died. The court, applying the stringent evidentiary standards required for capital conviction in the Iranian legal system, confirmed eleven murders beyond the threshold of proof required. The total number of men she married and who subsequently died under her care is considerably higher.
She is believed, by investigators and by the prosecutors who tried her, to have killed more than twenty men.
When investigators asked how many she had killed, she said she could not remember precisely. Not amnesia. The cycle of identification, marriage, administration, and collection had repeated often enough that the specific instances had blurred into the general practice.
THE FAMILIES AND THE COURT
The trial at the Mazandaran Revolutionary Court drew more than forty-five plaintiffs — the families of confirmed and suspected victims who had come to understand, across months of investigation, what had happened to their fathers and grandfathers in the quiet of a house they had trusted a kind woman to care for.
The weight of what these families carried into that courtroom is difficult to fully account for. They had grieved men whose deaths they had accepted as natural. They had consoled themselves with the understanding that an elderly man dying of heart failure or organ decline was not a tragedy but a completion — a long life ending as long lives end. That understanding had been taken from them and replaced with something much harder: the knowledge that the deaths had been caused, had been deliberate, had been the result of a system applied to their fathers with calculation and patience.
The grief had to be done again. The anger had nowhere adequate to land.
Ten families demanded qisas — the principle of equivalent retribution under Islamic law, which in the case of murder translates to the death penalty. Ten death sentences were handed down by the court, one for each of the families who demanded it.
The eleventh family made a different choice. They accepted blood money — the financial compensation that Islamic law permits as an alternative to qisas when a victim's family chooses it. Their reasons are their own and deserve to be respected without analysis.
Kulthum Akbari was sentenced to ten death sentences, to be carried out in sequence if the first is not commuted. She received an additional ten years of imprisonment for the attempted murder of Gholamreza Babaei — the man whose son went to the police, whose survival unravelled everything.
She is currently awaiting execution.
WHAT THE SYSTEM REQUIRED
The case of Kulthum Akbari is, on one level, a case about a person who chose to kill for money across more than two decades. On another level — the level that the families of her victims and the investigators who reconstructed her history have to sit with — it is a case about a system that made her almost perfectly invisible.
Every element of her method was calibrated to exploit the assumptions that protect the innocent. Elderly men die. Elderly men's deaths are not investigated as a matter of routine. The substances she used produce symptoms that look like natural decline. The men she targeted had existing health conditions that provided cover for whatever she introduced. She moved between cities, meaning no single location accumulated enough deaths to suggest a pattern. She was warm and trustworthy in a way that families found genuinely reassuring — not as a performance she was straining to maintain but as a quality she had refined into the foundation of the operation.
The one element her system did not account for was a man who paid careful attention to his own body, told his son, and a son who heard something from a family friend and connected it. The arrest of Kulthum Akbari required that specific chain of events — the survival of Babaei, his willingness to trust his own perception, his son's willingness to take it seriously, the coincidental disclosure from the family friend.
Remove any single link from that chain and she is not in a courtroom. She is at another gathering, speaking openly about her desire to marry an elderly man who lives alone, meeting the next family that needs someone to care for their father.
More than forty-five families came to court. The confirmed victim count is eleven. The believed count is more than twenty. Somewhere in the gap between those numbers are men whose families do not know what happened to them — who have grieved and accepted and moved on, without any reason to question the account they were given.
They may never know. The woman who could tell them said, under interrogation, that she could not remember precisely.
She had been doing it for twenty-two years. There had been enough of them.
She had lost count.
- Sources & Further Reading: This account is sourced from the official court proceedings at the Mazandaran Revolutionary Court, Iran, September 2025. The conviction and sentencing are documented in Iran International (September 23, 2025), The Telegraph (August 2025), Gulf News, and multiple international outlets. The Wikipedia entry on Kulthum Akbari aggregates the documented investigative and court record. Gholamreza Babaei's role in the arrest and the family friend connection are documented in The Telegraph and in Iranian judicial sources. The detail regarding Akbari's statement that she could not remember the precise number of her victims is documented in multiple court reports and in The Telegraph's reporting. Akbari is currently awaiting execution as of the date of publication. This article is written with full respect for the victims of Kulthum Akbari and their families.