Freedom for infamous serial killer

French serial killer Charles Sobhraj, who committed a string of murders across Asia in the 1970s was expected to be freed from prison in Nepal.

Nepal's top court ruled on Wednesday that Sobhraj, 78, who has been in prison there since 2003 for two killings in the 1970s, was to be released early on health grounds and deported within 15 days.

Sobhraj needed open heart surgery in 2017 and his release was in keeping with a law allowing the compassionate discharge of bedridden prisoners who have served three-quarters of a sentence.

Sobhraj, a French citizen of Vietnamese and Indian parentage, began traveling in the early 1970s and after spending time in Hong Kong where he operated as a gem dealer he wound up living in Bangkok.

There he would befriend people, many of them Western backpackers on the hippie trail, before drugging, robbing and murdering them.

"He despised backpackers," said Australian journalist Julie Clarke, who has interviewed Sobhraj. "He saw them as poor young drug addicts. He considered himself a criminal hero."

Suave and sophisticated, Sobhraj was implicated in his first murder, that of a young American woman whose body was found on a Thai beach wearing a bikini, in 1975. Nicknamed the "Bikini Killer," he was eventually linked to more than 20 murders.

Sobhraj's other sobriquet was "The Serpent," which became the title for a 2021 hit series by the BBC and Netflix that was based on his life.

He was arrested in India in 1976 and ultimately spent 21 years in prison there, with a brief break in 1986 when he escaped but was recaptured in Goa.

Released in 1997, Sobhraj lived in Paris, giving paid interviews to journalists, but went back to Nepal in 2003.

He was spotted in Kathmandu's tourist district and arrested in a casino. A court there handed him 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.

Behind bars, Sobhraj maintained that he was innocent of both murders and claimed he had never been to Nepal before the trip that resulted in his arrest.

Nadine Gires, a Frenchwoman who lived in the same Bangkok apartment block as Sobhraj, said last year she found him a "cultured" and impressive character, but then he turned out to be a swindler, seducer, robber of tourists and an "evil murderer."

Former Thai police officer Sompol Suthimai, 90, who helped Interpol in securing the arrest of Sobhraj in 1976, had pushed for him to be extradited to Thailand and to be tried for murders he committed there.

But he said yesterday he did not object to the release by the court in Nepal and "I don't have any feelings toward him now that it's been so long. I think he has already paid for his actions."

AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE