Tivon Askari

"Have you forgotten? I know exactly how to get what I want."

Tivon Askari was a prolific torturer, serial killer, bomber, abductor, and international criminal who appeared in Season Nine of Criminal Minds.

Background
Askari grew up as an orphan on the streets of Tikrit, Iraq, and was homeless from the ages of seven to nine. When he was ten years old, he was raped for the first time. Since then, he led a life of violence, having already killed three people before he turned thirteen. As an adult, Askari became a highly-educated member of the Iraqi Republican Guard, which gave him the opportunity to torture people and get away with it. He was eventually caught torturing prisoners-of-war out of pure pleasure. Being presumably kicked out because of that, he switched careers and began working with the U.S. State Department in July 2010, as an interrogation specialist and an interpreter for Operation: Classified, which tracked down Osama bin Laden, during which he worked alongside Jennifer Jareau, Mateo Cruz, then-FBI Section Chief Director Erin Strauss, and Michael Hastings.

As a result, the former job required him to use torture in order to extract information from informants, and, being a closet sadist, he derived pleasure from the torture. Some of the people he tortured, including a couple named Savin and Nadia Mubari, were killed. He also killed their daughter, who was a hostage held by members of a terrorist regime he was secretly working for. Eventually, Askari was exposed as a traitor, having been spying on the rest of the task force, and as a result, he fled with Hastings, also a traitor, during an ambush on a convoy carrying them on April 24, 2011. Soon after, they began fully working for the regime, all the while seething in hatred at his former coworkers. Eventually, in 2014, he, Hastings, and several other members of the regime were assigned to retrieve codes that would access Integrity, a database that was containing information relating to Operation: Classified, which were intended to be sold to enemies of the U.S.; these codes were known only to JJ and Cruz, the only members of Integrity that were still alive.

200
After members of the regime squad abduct JJ and Cruz, Askari personally confronts the former and drugs her. He then proceeds to torture both in order to learn the codes, but proves to be unsuccessful. He even fakes Cruz's death in order to get JJ to talk, but the ploy fails. Finally, JJ gives up her codes when Cruz, acting on Askari's orders, persuades her to do so. When Askari learns that Cruz knows his own codes, Hastings takes over the interrogation process and manages to get Cruz to reveal them by attempting to rape JJ. Upon starting the downloading of data onto Hastings' cellphone, Askari slashes the throat of one of their accomplices in front of JJ (possibly to remove loose ends) and stabs Cruz in the stomach (severely wounding him). He then prepares to slash JJ's throat when the BAU burst in and Hotch opens fire, shooting him twice and killing him; JJ and Cruz are both freed. Hastings is later killed when he falls off a roof during a struggle with JJ, with the downloading being cancelled after his cellphone is destroyed during the fall.

The Forever People
Askari reappears in the episode, mostly through flashbacks. Near the end of the episode, Reid, who becomes aware of JJ's emotional struggles with the upcoming one-year anniversary of her abduction and torture, calls Prentiss and asks her for extra background intelligence on Askari. He tells JJ about this after they finish a case and that the file is in her old office. She decides to look at the file and learns about Askari's troubled childhood. He then suddenly appears in her office and taunts her, saying that he merely "bent" her and wanted to do more to her when he was torturing her. JJ accuses him of killing her unborn baby during the 2011 convoy ambush and for taking away everything else she had. Askari then responds that he will next take her sleep, then her smile, then her security, then her job, and then finally, her family. He then tells her about the risk she took during her latest case, when she fired her gun unprovoked despite the danger of igniting gas that was leaking into the room she was in. Askari adds that he will watch her kill herself, or otherwise quit and spend the rest of her life in emotional pain. JJ snarls "No", only to realize Askari isn't there anymore, having been a hallucination the entire time.

Modus Operandi
"If I were you, I would save my strength."

Askari usually tortured his victims through a variety of brutal ways (such as being sprayed with a powerful hose, waterboarding, and electroshock) in order to extract important information from them, and some were tortured so severely that they were killed. When he killed incidental victims, he shot them with an M1911A1 handgun, slashed their throats with a knife, or used homemade explosives.

Profile
Initially believed to be acting alone, Askari was profiled by the BAU team as being highly trained, organized, and meticulous who typically spends 24 hours with his subjects, torturing them with the standard techniques until they break. He seems to be keeping his "torture ritual" to an established timeline, which gives off the impression of a "perfect methodology" that evolved through years of practice. Of all of the torture techniques he used, Askari never used sexual torture, indicating that he has lines that he doesn't cross. Torturers are driven by a false sense of moral superiority and already derive enough sexual pleasure from the torture that they inflict on their victims. The behavior Askari exhibits is characteristic to not only a torturer, but a sadistic serial killer who loves to get off on the torture.

Known Victims

 * Pre-1986, unspecified locations: Three unnamed people
 * Unspecified dates and locations in 1986(?) to 2010: Numerous unnamed victims
 * October 2010, unspecified location in Afghanistan: Savin Mubari
 * 2011:
 * February:
 * Unspecified location in Afghanistan: Nadia Mubari's unnamed daughter
 * Unspecified location in Pakistan: Nadia Mubari
 * April 24, unspecified location in Afghanistan: The convoy ambush:
 * Two unnamed soldiers
 * An unnamed soldier
 * Mateo Cruz
 * Jennifer Jareau
 * Unspecified dates and locations from 2011 to 2014: Numerous unnamed captured U.S. soldiers
 * 2014, Washington, D.C., U.S.:
 * January 23-24:
 * Jennifer Jareau
 * Mateo Cruz
 * January 24: An unnamed man

Appearances

 * Season Nine
 * To Bear Witness
 * Strange Fruit
 * 200
 * Mr. & Mrs. Anderson
 * Angels
 * Season Ten
 * X
 * The Forever People
 * Season Eleven
 * A Beautiful Disaster