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Lesser Known But Intriguing Historic Criminals

Khalid Elhassan October 17, 2019 32 min

U.S. Destroyers: An Illustrated Design History - Crime

12. From Fraud to Murder

After fleeing France, Charles Sobhraj engaged in a variety of criminal schemes, including one with his brother that backfired, and left his sibling doing 18 years in a Turkish prison. Sobhraj then took a dark turn, graduated from scams and thefts to murder, and began piling up corpses all along the Hippie Trail.

It is estimated that Sobhraj murdered at least 20 Western tourists, and the actual count might be significantly higher. He was finally caught in 1976, after he tried drugging some tourists in India, but screwed up the dosage. His intended victims retained enough consciousness to realize what Sobhraj had tried to do, and overpowered him until police arrived. His criminal escapades were not over, however.

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.