Charming and Erratic, a Notorious Afghan Speaks

Jalalabad, Afghanistan:

One of Afghanistan's most notorious serial killers lives in a dank prison cell in Jalalabad, sharing bunk beds, meals and blankets with fellow inmates. But the guards do not carry weapons, and the prison aides spend much of their days socializing with the convicts.

The killer, Shirin Gul, is in Nangarhar Women's Prison, where most of her fellow inmates were convicted of adultery or theft. She is in the 12th year of a 20-year prison sentence for a killing spree that claimed the lives of 27 men. Her 7-year-old daughter was conceived and born in custody, and other inmates also have children living in the cells with them.

In Afghanistan, a country of 30 million people where war has dominated the past four decades, death is a common feature of life. Lurid, tabloid-worthy serial homicide, however, is a relative rarity. That one of the culprits in the male-dominated society is a woman makes the case even more of a rarity.

"We have other murderers here," said Col. Abdul Wali Hesarak, the warden of the Nangarhar prison, which includes both male and female compounds and is one of the largest in the country. "But I don't see any cases as serious as hers."

To hear Shirin Gul tell it, the murders were her lover's idea, though she admits that she had consented to his killing her husband. She knew that her lover, Rahmatullah, poisoned his victims by slipping toxins into the tea and kebabs that she served them. And it is true that she frequently heard the sound of shovels in her courtyard, when graves were being dug.

But Shirin Gul says her confession to murder was a fabrication. She never killed anyone, she says, and she feared for her life while Rahmatullah was on a killing spree.

In an interview at her prison quarters in Jalalabad, Shirin Gul, who is in her 40s but does not know her exact age, came across as erratic. She openly admitted to having mental health problems, making it difficult to separate truth from fiction in her narratives.

She laughed uncontrollably one moment and appeared on the verge of tears the next. She cursed Rahmatullah, with whom she was convicted of the murders, calling him "a womanizer, a pedophile and a gambler," and almost in the same breath said that he was the "most beautiful man she had ever known."

"My character is bad, but sometimes I behave well," she said, as her daughter crawled on and off her lap.

Shirin Gul is also charming. The male prison guards say they think of her as a sister. Her fellow inmates show her respect, perhaps both out of fear and grudging admiration. She wears heavy black eye shadow and bright red lipstick, and her arms are covered in faded blue tattoos. She has large cheeks and a small chin that accentuate her broad, easy smile.

But her life story is rife with abuse, often at the hands of the men closest to her.

When Shirin Gul confessed to murder in 2004, she told investigators that she had lured her victims to her home with the promise of sex. There, she said, Rahmatullah, her son and several other men helped her poison and strangle the victims. Their bodies were buried in the courtyards of two homes the family kept, one in Kabul and the other in Jalalabad. The dead men's cars were stripped of license plates and sold along the border with Pakistan and in a Taliban-controlled area of Khost province.

It was only after a businessman, Mohammed Anwar, disappeared that the authorities began investigating Shirin Gul and her family. The businessman had mentioned to a relative where he was going the night of his disappearance, providing the police with a clue and ultimately unraveling a string of disappearances. At the Kabul home, nine bodies were unearthed from the dirt courtyard; the home in Jalalabad yielded 18 more victims.

Six people, including Shirin Gul, her son, Samiullah, and Rahmatullah, were charged with 27 counts of murder in the case, convicted and sentenced to death. Investigators told reporters at the time that Shirin Gul and most of her accomplices had confessed to the crimes. The other five were executed. But Shirin Gul's life was spared by a decree from Hamid Karzai, then the president of Afghanistan. Her crimes were reduced to 27 counts of kidnapping and one count of adultery. Her death sentence was changed to a 20-year term - considered life imprisonment in the Afghan system.

Despite her claims of innocence, she has also confessed her crimes to visitors, other inmates, prison staff and a mental health expert who occasionally visited the women's prison over more than a year. She told the caseworker, Mahnaz Saadati, that the group committed the murders for money, earning the equivalent of thousands of dollars by selling their victims' cars. They earned enough to help a mosque near their home in Kabul, for which they provided food on Fridays as well as new carpeting.

"She is like a character out of a movie," Saadati said of Shirin Gul.

Information about her case has largely vanished from the official archives. Few law enforcement officers seem to remember it. The office of the president, which retains records on decrees, has what amounts to the only publicly available document on the murders: one sheet of paper that summarizes the basic details, along with a note about Shirin Gul's altered sentence. Officials said that neither the Supreme Court nor the police could locate files relating to the case.

The details of Shirin Gul's life are similarly hard to verify, and come mostly from her own descriptions or from the people with whom she has spoken since her imprisonment. Years and ages are a jumble; her memories are confused. Most of her family members and others with whom she was close have died or could not be reached.

Shirin Gul was born in the Shewa district of Nangarhar province, in the east of the country. She says her parents died when she was 2, and that relatives married her off to an older man when she was just 11. Her husband, who was a colonel in the communist government, beat her and mistreated her, she said. One of his cousins, Rahmatullah, the driver for a Taliban strongman, visited the family often.

The more Rahmatullah visited, Shirin Gul said, the closer the two became. He brought food and gifts to the house, sometimes just for her.

Eventually, he told Shirin Gul's husband that he was in love with her, and that he planned to take her away. The husband, fearful of resisting Rahmatullah, conceded. It was then, she said, that she and Rahmatullah decided to kill her husband.

"When someone becomes a coward," she said, "he deserves death." Shortly before Rahmatullah became her lover, Shirin Gul discovered that he was involved in criminal rings in Kabul and Jalalabad: He had kidnapped and killed drivers, and later sold their vehicles. She says that she begged him to stop, but that she came to fear him, worried that he might hurt her if she tried to stop his illegal activities.

"We could not say anything because we feared him," she said. It is for this reason, among others, that Shirin Gul is hopeful that she might be granted an early release from prison.

"The prosecutors can make up things, you know, for money," she said. "Even if I was an infidel or a pig, I could not do such things." In the women's prison in Jalalabad, more than a dozen children live with their mothers under the watch of security guards and a flock of women who serve as caretakers to the female prisoners. One of those women laughed when asked about Shirin Gul's story.

She had heard many versions over the years, she said. "Of course she is lying," she added. "She definitely killed those men."