Aharon Galstyan

In 2016, three robberies occurred in St. Petersburg, one of which resulted in a fatality. The victim, Alexander Laptev, was a bank manager whose corpse was found in March on the Oktyabrskaya Embankment, without any outward signs of violence. A criminal case was initiated thanks to his father, a former military officer, and not longer, the perpetrators were arrested: they were four men (Nazim Hasanov, Rakhim Aliyev, Sherzat Kodirov and Nakhmad Tarverdiyev) illegally operating as taxi drivers. Like Galstyan before them, they had drugged their passengers with psychotropic drugs, robbed them of their valuables and then abandoned them near roads. For their roles in Laptev's murder, Hasanov and Aliyev received life sentences, while Kodirov and Tarverdiyev were given 12 and 9 years imprisonment, respectively, in a special regime colony.

When the initial crimes began in April 2005, the incidents were written off as simple one-offs and were largely ignored by police. However, within the next three years, the city's morgues saw a peculiar rise in drug-related deaths involving Azaleptin, with most of the victims being found near highway roads. Eventually, the local authorities took interest in the case, as the suspicious similarities led them to believe that a criminal was drugging and robbing citizens of their valuables in the area, and the cases were connected.

Aharon Garushovich Galstyan (Russian: Агарон Гарушович Галстян; born 1970), known as The Taxi Driver Poisoner (Russian: Таксист-отравитель), 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.

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.