MOHAMMAD SADEQ KHALKHALI was often referred to in the English-speaking press as the Judge Jeffreys of the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran. The comparison is somewhat unfair to the Hanging Judge of James II in the late 1680s: Baron Jeffreys of Wem never executed 12-year-old boys caught on the streets for selling opposition pamphlets. Khalkhali also shed blood on a much greater scale. With Islamic militants still ruling Iran, the true number of his victims has not been investigated but it is estimated to be at least 8,000 campaigners for the rights of ethnic minorities, leftist dissenters and officers of the overthrown monarchy. He sent them before firing squads normally after trials of only a few minutes, with Khalkhali acting as both prosecutor and judge.

The horrific scale of his activity was due to his being personally appointed to his post as the Islamic judge in charge of revolutionary courts by Ayatollah Khomeini, the supreme leader of the state. He later wrote in his memoirs that when he complained to Khomeini about interference in his work by some of the more liberally inclined in the Government, Khomeini told him: “Just take them by the scruff of the neck and throw them aside like all the others.”

That Khomeini knew the depth of his cruelty is illustrated by a story told by Abol-Hassan Bani-Sadr, the first President of the Islamic Republic. Khomeini told Bani-Sadr that Khalkhali had asked to be made Prime Minister, to which Khomeini had laughingly replied: “If I make you Prime Minister, you’ll execute half the country.”

After the first and most notorious phase of his career in the new Iran, Khalkhali served as a member of the Islamic Assembly for a number of years while Khomeini still lived. He wanted to specialise in foreign relations, and on a number of occasions he represented Iran abroad. In the assembly itself, he would at times take off his sandals and attempt to beat up his opponents with them.

After the death of his mentor in 1989, the Government tried to distance itself from him by barring him from standing again for the Assembly on account of his being responsible “for the blood of many innocent people”. But he was never tried and continued to draw a generous official pension till his death, when many reformists around President Khatami joined his hardline supporters in eulogising his services to the state.

Khalkhali was born in 1926 in the Turkish-speaking village of Geev near the town of Khalkhal in Iranian Azerbaijan, and spoke Persian with a heavy Turkish accent. He was a fat, balding man with a short neck and an unpleasant voice, all of which was popularly suspected to explain the bent of his mind. He was said to have had a youthful penchant for strangling cats.

Born into a poor farmer’s family, he left Geev after a rudimentary education for the city of Qom in central Iran to become a cleric. There he made the acquaintance of the elder son of Khomeini and found his way into the latter’s classes when Khomeini was suspected of links with a terrorist Islamist group, the Fedayeen (sacrificials) of Islam. Khalkhali later boasted that he had become a member of the group and taken part in the assassination of politicians under the monarchy in the 1960s. He was appointed to supervise the revolutionary courts of the new state only three days after Khomeini took over Iran on February 11, 1979.

Within days Khalkhali was busy sending up to a dozen figures from the ousted regime to firing squads, sometimes set up on the roofs of schools in the middle of Tehran. He also destroyed the mausoleums of two kings, Reza Shah and Nasser-eddin Shah, from the Pahlavi and Qajar dynasties respectively.

His most famous victim was the former Prime Minister, Amir-Abbas Hoveyda, who had served Mohammad-Reza Shah for 13 years but had been abandoned by his King in a futile attempt to appease opponents. Khalkhali himself said later that just over 500 such officers and servants of the previous regime were executed by him, all of which received the support of leftist, non-Islamic parties such as the pro-Soviet Communist Party.

Embarrassed by the abhorrence of the world at such brutality, President Bani-Sadr won the consent of Khomeini to sideline Khalkhali by putting him in charge of courts dealing with drug smugglers. But after Bani-Sadr himself had been forced to flee the country in the spring of 1982, Khalkhali was brought back and given the task of rooting out leftist dissenters and putting down a number of rebellions in the provinces, especially those of the Kurds in the west, the Turkomans in the northeast and the Arabs in the south.

It was at this time that boys as young as 12 were executed by him on account of their being fully responsible for their actions according to religious dogma. In the Kurdish city of Kermanshah, a 12-year-old boy was shot after a summary trial for selling pamphlets by the Democratic Party of Kurdistan. On another occasion, when it was shown that a 14-year boy he had executed had been innocent of the charges, Khalkhali shrugged his shoulders and said: “Oh, well. So I’ve sent him to Heaven.” Indeed, to the end of his life, he never showed any remorse for his acts. On the contrary, on many occasions he told reporters that he had killed too few people and that given the chance again he would have killed many more.

After retiring to Qom in the early 1990s, Khalkhali attempted to reinvent himself as a scholar by writing a thesis on Islamic law, but it was found to be heavily plagiarised from the works of Khomeini. Thus, although widely referred to in the West as an ayatollah, he never achieved such status. In Iran, he was given the honorary title of hojjatol-Islam, a second-rank mullah.

He died at home after a long and painful struggle with arthritis, heart disease and cancer.

Mohammad Sadeq Khalkhali, judge, was born on July 27, 1926. He died on November 27, 2003, aged 77.