Johnson Aziga was born in 1956 in Uganda, later immigrating to Canada, where he built a respectable life as a civil servant. He worked for the Ontario Ministry of the Attorney General in Hamilton, Ontario, and was known as an educated and sociable man within his community. In 1996, Aziga received a life‑changing diagnosis: he was HIV‑positive. At the time, he was married, and he reportedly disclosed his condition to his wife and used protection during intercourse. However, his marriage eventually ended in divorce, and Aziga’s conduct changed dramatically.

Following his diagnosis, Aziga began engaging in frequent sexual activity with women he met at bars, nightclubs, and social events in the Hamilton area. According to court records, he was sexually active with 50 to 100 women, nearly all of them white, and admitted to having unprotected sex with at least 11 women without informing them of his HIV status. This deliberate non‑disclosure would have catastrophic consequences. Several of these women went on to test positive for HIV, and two eventually died of AIDS‑related complications.

Aziga’s case was further complicated by allegations that public health authorities and law enforcement had been aware of his ongoing conduct for years but took no immediate action. Their failure to intervene earlier has been a source of significant controversy in Canadian public health and legal circles.

The first woman known to have been infected by Johnson Aziga died of AIDS‑related complications in December 2003, and a second victim died in May 2004. Both women had engaged in sexual relationships with Aziga without ever being informed of his HIV‑positive status, rendering them unable to give informed consent — a crucial legal concept in Canadian sexual assault law. Several other women he had unprotected sex with also tested positive for HIV, and at least one narrowly avoided infection.

Aziga’s actions took place in the legal context of R. v. Cuerrier (1999), a landmark Supreme Court of Canada decision establishing that knowingly exposing a partner to HIV without disclosure constitutes fraud vitiating consent. Under Canadian criminal law, sexual intercourse without informed consent is aggravated sexual assault, and if a death results from such an assault, the perpetrator may be charged with first‑degree murder.

Despite this legal precedent, Aziga continued his pattern of deception until his arrest. On August 2003, he was taken into custody, and prosecutors charged him with multiple counts of aggravated sexual assault, attempted aggravated sexual assault, and first‑degree murder following the deaths of two of his victims. 

Aziga’s trial, delayed multiple times, finally began in October 2008. During the proceedings, several of his former partners testified that he had lied about his HIV status and continued to have unprotected sex even after learning of his infection. His defense team attempted to argue that there was no conclusive evidence linking the victims’ deaths directly to HIV infection from Aziga, but medical evidence and epidemiological tracing undermined that claim.

On April 4, 2009, a jury of nine men and three women found Johnson Aziga guilty of two counts of first‑degree murder, 10 counts of aggravated sexual assault, and one count of attempted aggravated sexual assault. The murder convictions were based on the legal principle that the victims’ deaths resulted from aggravated sexual assaults caused by Aziga’s deliberate non‑disclosure. He was sentenced to life imprisonment with no possibility of parole for 25 years, the mandatory sentence in Canada for first‑degree murder.