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 100 miles north-west 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 in the city 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 £16,000. 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 after regaining consciousness.

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 was afflicted by 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, the police chief said.

After apparently being so careful to stay ahead of the police, it seems that the most mundane of transgressions, a road traffic offence, alerted detectives and led to her arrest.

Officers first suspected the killer may have been a woman after studying a footprint found near one of the bodies. They were only led to Mahin after a 60-year-old woman, having read about the murders, told them she had escaped from a light-coloured Renault car after becoming suspicious of the female driver.

After checking cars matching that description, their attention was drawn to Mahin by records showing she had been fined following a recent road accident.