Aharon Galstyan

Aharon Garushovich Galstyan (; born 1970), known as The Taxi Driver Poisoner , is an Armenian-born Russian serial killer and thief. Operating in St. Petersburg, he would drug his passengers with Azaleptin (sleeping medicine containing clonazepam) and rob them of their valuables, and in seven cases, his victims died, their bodies discarded near bodies of water. Despite his insistence on his innocence, Galstyan was found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment with no chance of parole.

Early life Galstyan was born in the Armenian SSR in 1970, but it is unknown when he immigrated to Russia. After living in Moscow for a while, he moved in with a relative in St. Petersburg and began working as a private cab driver, driving a Lada Samara 2. During a visit to his doctor, he was prescribed Azaleptin, a powerful sleeping medicine that could prove fatal if ingested in large doses. Not long after, Galstyan would begin using it in his thefts.

Crimes Aharon's crimes followed the same modus operandi: upon seeing a suitable passenger, he would pick them up and drive to their desired destination. Unlike most men in his profession, he didn't bargain on prices, his only condition being that they would stop at gas stations to have a drink, to which most of his passengers agreed. After buying the drinks, which ranged from coffee to Coca-Cola, he would lace them with Azaleptin and serve the spiked brew to the victim. Paradoxically, he also claimed to have never worked as a cab driver at all but simply transported food to the stores that his relatives owned. His defence lawyers demanded that their client be acquitted, as, according to him, the media had fabricated the whole story and wanted to pin it on him because he was a foreigner who couldn't defend himself accordingly.