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History’s Top Executioners of All Time

Khalid Elhassan June 5, 2020 34 min

26. From Petty Crimes to Serial Killing

Charles Sobhraj and his girlfriend. Fruit Loops

In India, Charles Sobhraj ran a car theft and smuggling ring until 1973, when he was arrested for an attempted robbery of a jewelry store. He managed to escape, however, and fled to Afghanistan. There, Sobhraj and his girlfriend began preying on tourists along the “Hippie Trail” – an overland route between Europe and South Asia, popular with Hippies and Beatniks between the 1950s and 1970s.

Sobhraj’s girlfriend eventually left him and returned to France. He carried on with a variety of criminal schemes, including one with his brother that backfired, and left his sibling serving an eighteen-year sentence in a Turkish prison. From then on, Sobhraj’s crimes grew steadily darker, and he began piling up the bodies of murder victims all along the Hippie Trail. It is believed that he murdered at least 20 Western tourists, but the actual body count is thought by many to be significantly higher.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.