Serial killer Charles Sobhraj to be released from Nepal prison

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Serial killer Charles Sobhraj, once one of the most wanted criminals in Asia and best known for his brazen escape from Delhi’s Tihar Jail, is set to walk free from a Nepal prison after the country’s top court ordered his release on health grounds, reported Hindustan Times.

Sobhraj, 78, has been in jail in Nepal since 2003 for murdering two North American tourists in the 1970s. Nepal’s Supreme Court ordered his release on Wednesday due to his age, saying in a ruling: “Keeping him in the prison continuously is not in line with the prisoner’s human rights.”

The court further said that he should be released by Wednesday if there were no more pending cases against him and that he should be returned to “his country within 15 days”.

The verdict marked another twist in the life of the charismatic conman, a French citizen of Vietnamese and Indian parentage who evaded the law in several Asian countries in the 1970s while befriending and robbing young backpackers before graduating to murdering them and using their passports for his own travels.

It is still unclear why Sobhraj traveled in 2003 to Nepal, where he was wanted for several murders. He was arrested in Kathmandu after being spotted in a casino, and a court in Nepal subsequently sentenced him to life imprisonment for murdering an American tourist, Connie Joe Bronzich, in 1975. He was convicted of killing Canadian backpacker Laurent Carrier in 2014 and given a second life sentence, reads the report.

In between the two convictions, Sobhraj married Nihita Biswas, the daughter of his Nepalese lawyer who was 44 years his junior, during a secret ceremony in jail in 2008.

In India, Sobhraj gained notoriety when he escaped from Delhi’s Tihar Jail in 1986 after feeding the guards cakes, cookies and grapes laced with sleeping pills. The jailbreak triggered a nationwide manhunt and Sobhraj was arrested at O Coqueiro, then a popular hangout for hippies in Goa, 22 days later by inspector Madhukar Zende.

Before being held in Goa, Sobhraj was reportedly riding around on a pink motorcycle in outlandish disguises.

At the time of the escape, Sobhraj was serving a 12-year sentence for poisoning a group of French tourists in 1976 and robbing them. He ultimately spent 21 years in jail though he was never convicted of all the 24 murders he had committed in Thailand, Nepal and India.

Investigators in these countries said most of these murders had common traits – the victims were young backpackers, they were usually stabbed and their bodies burnt so that they could not be identified, and Sobhraj usually used their passports to travel along with his female companions to his next destination, reads the report.

“He despised backpackers, he saw them as poor young drug addicts,” Australian journalist Julie Clarke, who interviewed Sobhraj in prison in Delhi, told AFP in 2021. “He considered himself a criminal hero.”

Sobhraj even sold his story from prison to a publishing house and recounted the murders in chilling detail while talking to reporters. Sobhraj’s nickname, “The Serpent”, came from his ability to assume other identities and was also used as the title of a popular streaming series produced by Netflix and BBC.

Hatchand Bhaonani Gurumukh Charles Sobhraj was born in Saigon in 1940 to an Indian businessman and a Vietnamese shop assistant. After his parents separated, his mother married a French soldier and moved the family to France.

Sobhraj turned to petty crimes such as car thefts and muggings as a teenager and served terms in delinquent homes and prisons in France before he made his way to Asia in the early 1970s, just at the time when large numbers of young Europeans were hitting what came to be known as the Hippie Trail to make low-budget visits to the region. At a time of porous borders, Sobhraj moved from one country to another and committed a string of crimes. He was imprisoned in Greece and Afghanistan but escaped in both countries.

He eventually arrived in Thailand, where he was implicated in his first murder, that of a young American woman whose body was found on a beach in Pattaya in 1975. He masqueraded as a gemstone trader to lure cash-strapped travellers before drugging, robbing and killing them.

Sobhraj, who spoke several languages, was finally caught in India in 1976, when he and his then companion, French-Canadian nurse Marie-Andrée Leclerc, drugged a group of French students and they fell sick in a hotel in New Delhi.

After his recapture following his escape from Tihar Jail, Sobhraj was given another 10-year prison term. He moved to France when he was finally released from prison in India in 1997.

He even claim later that the escape from Tihar Jail was a well-crafted plan to have his sentence extended to avoid extradition to Thailand, where he was wanted for several murders and could have faced the death penalty.

In France, Sobhraj would charge journalists up to $6,000 for an interview about his notorious years in Asia and reportedly sold the rights of his life for a film for $15 million.

While in prison in Nepal, Sobhraj reportedly lived in comfort, provided with a foam pillow, mineral water, and meals from a Kathmandu restaurant, reads the report by HT.

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