A court in Nepal has ordered the release of Charles Sobjraj. Nicknamed the Serpent, this 78-year-old man is suspected of a series of murders in Asia in the 1970s.
Nepal’s highest court on Wednesday ordered the release of Charles Sobhraj, the French serial killer portrayed in the Netflix series ‘The Serpent’, responsible for a string of murders across Asia in the 1970s.
The Supreme Court ruled that Charles Sobhraj, 78, imprisoned in the Himalayan republic since 2003 for the murder of two North American tourists, should be released on health grounds, according to a copy of the verdict.
Read also :
They stopped “The Serpent”: how Tarbes students brought down Charles Sobhraj in 1976
“Keeping him continuously in prison is inconsistent with the prisoner’s human rights,” the document reads. “If there are no other cases pending against him to keep him in prison, this court orders his release today and (…) the return to his country within fifteen days.”
Linked to twenty murders
After a troubled childhood and several stints in prison in France for minor crimes, Sobhraj began traveling the world in the early 1970s and ended up in Thailand’s capital, Bangkok. His modus operandi was to charm and befriend his victims, often spiritually-seeking Western backpackers, before drugging, robbing and murdering them. His involvement in a first murder dates back to 1975 when the body of a young American was found on a beach in Pattaya in a bikini. Described as gentle and sophisticated, he is linked to around twenty murders. His victims were strangled, beaten, or burned, and he often used the passports of his male victims to travel to his next destination.
Prison and release
Sobhraj’s nickname, “the serpent”, comes from his ability to assume other identities to escape justice. It became the title of a hit series made by the BBC and Netflix which is inspired by his life. He was arrested in India in 1976, after the poisoning death of a French tourist in a Delhi hotel, and was sentenced to 12 years in prison for murder. Sobhraj eventually spent 21 years in prison, with a brief break in 1986 when he escaped before being arrested again in the Indian coastal state of Goa.
Released in 1997, he retired to Paris but resurfaced in 2003 in Nepal, where he was spotted in the tourist district of Kathmandu and arrested. The following year a court sentenced him to life in prison for killing American tourist Connie Jo Bronzich in 1975. Ten years later he was also found guilty of murdering Ms Bronzich’s Canadian girlfriend. In prison in 2008, Sobhraj married Nihita Biswas, 44 years his junior and daughter of his Nepalese lawyer.