This was ordered by Nepal’s highest court on Wednesday 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 has actually ruled that this 78-year-old man, who has been jailed in the Himalayan Republic since 2003 for the murder of two North American tourists, should be released on health grounds.
“Keeping him in prison continuously goes against the human rights of the prisoner,” the ruling said. “Unless other proceedings are pending against him to keep him in prison, this court today orders his release and (…) return to his country within fifteen days. »
The serial killer required open-heart surgery and his release was in line with a Nepalese law that allowed the release of bedridden prisoners who had already served three-quarters of their sentence, the court added.
Charles Sobhraj is likely to be released from Kathmandu Central Prison on Thursday, a prison official said. He must first appear in court for paperwork before he can go free, the officer added.
21 years in prison
After a troubled childhood and several jail terms in France for petty crimes, Charles Sobhraj began to travel the world in the early 1970s, eventually ending up in the Thai capital of Bangkok. His modus operandi was to charm and befriend his victims, often spiritual-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 man in a bikini was found on a Pattaya beach.
Described as gentle and sophisticated, he is linked to around twenty murders. His victims were strangled, beaten, or burned, and he often used his male victims’ passports to travel to his next destination. Sobhraj’s nickname “the Serpent” comes from his ability to assume other identities to evade justice. It became the title of a BBC and Netflix hit series inspired by his life.
He was arrested in India in 1976 after the poisoning of a French tourist in a hotel in Delhi and sentenced to twelve years in prison for murder. Sobhraj eventually served twenty-one years in prison, with a brief break in 1986 when he escaped before being arrested again in the Indian coastal state of Goa. Released from prison in 1997, he retired to Paris but resurfaced in Nepal in 2003, where he was discovered in the tourist area of Kathmandu and arrested.
The following year, a court sentenced him to life imprisonment for killing American tourist Connie Jo Bronzich in 1975. Ten years later, he was also convicted of the murder of Bronzich’s Canadian girlfriend. In 2008, while in prison, Sobhraj married Nihita Biswas, 44 years his junior and the daughter of his Nepalese lawyer.
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