Charles Sobhraj Victims: How Many People did Charles Sobhraj Kill?

Charles Sobhraj is a French serial killer, fraudster, and thief who preyed on Western tourists travelling through South Asia on the hippie trail in the 1970s.

Sobhraj is suspected of murdering at least 20 tourists in South and Southeast Asia, including 14 in Thailand.

In 1975, Charles Sobhraj and his second-in-command, Ajay Chowdhury, committed their first known murders.

According to investigators, the majority of the victims had spent some time with the pair before their deaths and were recruited by Sobhraj and Chowdhury to join them in their crimes.

Sobhraj claimed that the majority of his murders were due to unintentional drug overdoses, but investigators claim that the victims had threatened to expose Sobhraj, which was his motivation for murder.

The first victim was a young woman from Seattle, Teresa Knowlton , who was found drowned in a tidal pool in the Gulf of Thailand, wearing a flowered bikini.

Vitali Hakim, a young nomadic Turkish Sephardic Jew, was the next victim, his burned body discovered on the road to the Pattaya resort.

After meeting Sobhraj in Hong Kong, Dutch students Henk Bintanja, 29, and his fiancée Cocky Hemker, 25, were invited to Thailand. On December 16, 1975, their bodies were discovered strangled and burned.

Sobhraj  was caught and convicted of the 1975 murder of Canadian tourist Laurent Carrière in the Bhaktapur district court on September 18, 2014, and sentenced to 20 years in prison.