’Serpent’ Serial killer Charles Sobhraj arrives in France after release

French serial killer Charles Sobhraj, responsible for multiple murders in the 1970s across Asia, arrived in France on Saturday after almost 20 years in prison in Nepal. Nepal’s top court ruled on Wednesday that he should be freed on health grounds and deported to France within 15 days.

On Friday, he was released and put on a flight at Kathmandu airport to take him to Paris via Doha. While on the flight to Doha, he insisted to an AFP journalist that he was “innocent”.

Sobhraj’s life was chronicled in the series “The Serpent”, co-produced by Netflix and the BBC, detailing how he terrorised the continent with a string of murders that targeted tourists. Sometimes posing as a gem trader, he would befriend his victims -- many of them Western backpackers on the 1970s hippie trail -- before drugging, robbing and murdering them.

The court ordered Sobhraj, who had heart surgery in 2017, be released on health grounds after he served more than three-quarters of his sentence for murdering a US tourist and a Canadian in Nepal in the 1970s. “I feel great... I have a lot to do. I have to sue a lot of people. Including the state of Nepal,” Sobhraj told AFP on Friday onboard the plane.

Asked if he thought he had been wrongly described as a serial killer, the 78-year-old said: “Yes, yes.” He landed in the French capital on Saturday morning, an AFP reporter confirmed.

On arrival at the Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris, he was taken away by border police for extra “identity checks”, according to an airport source. The source said he had left the airport, evading a media scrum waiting in the arrivals hall.

His French lawyer, Isabelle Coutant-Peyre, told reporters at the airport she was “very happy” he had been released, adding that he had been “unjustly sentenced in a fabricated case with false documents by the Nepali police”. “It’s a scandal, he is presented as a serial killer, which is completely false”

Accused of at least 15 murders across 10 countries, by the time he left Indian jails, his alleged other crimes had fallen under the statute of limitations in Thailand.

‘Bikini killer’ 

 Born in Saigon to an Indian father and a Vietnamese mother who later married a Frenchman, Sobhraj embarked on an international life of crime and ended up in Thailand in 1975. Suave and sophisticated, he was implicated in the murder of a young American woman, whose body was found on a beach wearing a bikini. Nicknamed the “bikini killer”, Sobhraj was eventually linked to more than 20 murders. 

He was arrested in India in 1976 and ultimately spent 21 years in jail there, with a brief break in 1986 when he drugged prison guards and escaped. He was recaptured in the Indian coastal state of Goa. Accused of at least 15 murders across 10 countries, by the time he left Indian jails, his alleged other crimes had fallen under the statute of limitations in Thailand. Released in 1997, Sobhraj lived in Paris, giving paid interviews to journalists, but went back to Nepal in 2003.

‘Karma’ 

 He was spotted in a casino playing baccarat by journalist Joseph Nathan, one of the founders of the Himalayan Times newspaper, and arrested. “He looked harmless... It was sheer luck that I recognised him,” Nathan told AFP on Thursday. “I think it was karma.” A court in Nepal handed Sobhraj a life sentence the following year for killing US tourist Connie Jo Bronzich in 1975. A decade later, he was also found guilty of killing Bronzich’s Canadian companion. Talking to AFP among bemused fellow Qatar Airways passengers on Friday, Sobhraj insisted he was innocent of the killings in Nepal. 

“The courts in Nepal, from (the) district court to high court to supreme court, all the judges, they were biased against Charles Sobhraj,” he said. “I am innocent in those cases, OK? So I don’t have to feel bad for that, or good. I am innocent. It was built on fake documents,” he added. Thai police officer Sompol Suthimai -- whose work with Interpol was instrumental in securing the 1976 arrest -- had pushed for Sobhraj to be extradited to Thailand and tried for murders there. 

But on Thursday, Sompol told AFP he did not object to the release, as both he and the criminal he once pursued were now too old. “I don’t have any feelings towards him now that it’s been so long,” said Sompol, 90. “I think he has already paid for his actions.” AFP