POLICE IN Iran believe they have caught the country’s first female serial killer and are claiming she has disclosed a literary inspiration behind her attempts to evade detection: the crime novels of Agatha Christie.
The 32-year-old suspect, named only as Mahin, stands accused of killing at least six people, including five women, according to officials in the city of Qazvin, about 160km (100 miles) northwest of Tehran.
“Mahin in her confessions has said that she has been taking patterns from Agatha Christie books and has been trying not to leave any trace of herself,” Mohammad Baqer Olfat, the Qazvin prosecutor, told Iranian journalists.
Mahin, who it is claimed also admitted the earlier murders of her former landlord and an aunt, is said to have carefully chosen her victims, targeting elderly and middle-aged women and offering them lifts home after picking them up at shrines where they had been praying.
Police said she confessed in custody to killing four such women in Qazvin since January, claiming to have been driven by a desperate need for money after chalking up debts of more than $24,000 (€17,300).
After offering her victims a lift, Mahin allegedly gave them fruit juice, which she had spiked with an anaesthetic to knock them out.
She would then suffocate them before stealing their jewellery and other possessions and dumping the bodies in secluded spots. One victim was beaten to death with an iron bar.
Which Christie novels Mahin studied has not yet been revealed, though many of the books describe killers using drugs.
Christie’s novels, some of which depict unsolved murders, are highly popular among Iranians.
The writer, who died in 1976, visited Iran several times and used it as the setting for one of her stories, The House at Shiraz.
Qazvin’s police chief, Ali Akbar Hedayati, said Mahin had a mental disorder triggered by having been deprived of her mother’s love. She would draw her chosen victims into conversation by telling them they reminded her of her mother, he said. – (Guardian service)